External Sound Card capabilites

[Livenoise]

Hello everyone!

 

I'll attempt to explain my current problem:

 

I am doing a sound design for a show in march and am planning on doing a form of surround sound with 4 flown active speakers (Front left, front right, rear left and rear right) and two active subs on the deck. Each speaker will need a seperate feed, except the subs which will be a single feed for the two. I will be running the show off SCS on my laptop.

 

The desk I will be using is the Allen & Heath GL2400 24channel, so routing these different sends isn't my issue. Getting 4/5 channels from my laptop is!

 

I am looking into external soundcards with mulitple outputs, but I am unsure of:

 

a) if it will work just by using the multiple outputs and a firewire input, as most (of what I can tell) are designed for mulitple inputs rather than outputs?

 

b) which unit will be best to achieve this. I have been looking mostly at the Focusite Sapphire LE Linky and the Alesis iO|26 Linky.

 

Another slight niggle of mine, is that I am reluctant to spend upwards of £200 for a one-trick pony. I would like the ability of multitrack recording too (not at the same time) if possible.

 

If anyone has any suggestions on what would be best, or any other ways of achieving this it would be greatly appreciated!

 

Many thanks,

 

Aidan

[boswell]

Look on SCS forum, there is a list of external cards that are known to work with SCS together with 8 output USB one around £100.

 

I use a ESI Gigaport USB to give 8 outputs ftom my lappy and an M-Audio Delta 1010 for 8 outs from desktop machine.

Both use ASIO drivers which the latest SCS supports.s

 

HTH