Line 6 Toneport UX2 vs. RME vs. M-Audio Audiophile

["Art Simon" <simart@gmail.com>]

I just got a Line 6 Toneport UX2 today, and thought people might be
interested in the surprising low latency of this USB soundcard. I'm
getting _lower_ latency with the UX2 than with either an RME Digi 96/8
PAD or the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI interfaces. I'm running a 3.2
Ghz P4 Shuttle Zen (38% peak on the Ableton Live 5 test--pretty
mediocre). I tested each soundcard with the same fairly cpu intensive
EnergyXT patch and I'm able to use a 128 buffer at 44.1khz no problem
with the UX2. The RME only goes down to 256, (and starts glitching if
I go up to 96Khz) and the best the Audiophile could do on the same
patch was 384.

I find this very surprising, as I've always understood USB soundcards
like the UX2 to be inherently inferior to PCI soundcards in terms of
latency.

In addition to low latency, I find the amp modeling to be excellent,
and there are stereo XLR mic inputs with phantom power. I think for
$200 this thing is a winner and a great choice for guitarists who use
a computer for looping. Worth checking out, though as always YMMV.
--
Art Simon
simart@null.net
http://art.simon.tripod.com