SEK'D  PRODIF 24

Type:            Dedicated Digital I/O ISA PC card
Design:         Germany
Year:            1996
Price:           about 375 USD/EUR (new 1998)
Homepage:  www.sekd.com

User Interface:
Editing Features:
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Digital to digital transfers

After the unexpected problem I got with the Guillemot Home Studio Pro 64, I badly needed a Digital S/PDIF I/O card to get all my precious sounds on my hard disk drive Digital to Digital using the A/D converters of my Promix01. I needed something that worked at the lowest price on the market and after a few reviews, the simplest and the cheapest althought Pro acquistition card was undoubtly the SEK'D Prodif24. Got the last one at a shop (seems that SEK'D is stopping it's production in favour of it's big brother on PCI bus Prodif32).

At first my impressions weren't quite good. The card component layout and design seemed quite basic not to say obsolescent... A unique large PLCC chip surrounded by a few 1/4w standard resistors and lone integrated chips more or less well soldered on  large and rare tracks gave me a strange impression of amateurism... Hope the sound doesn't reflect the construction quality.... Another thing quite strange worried me even more: you have to choose your memory I/O adress via a DIP switch !!! In the "Plug'n'Play" era, this seems quite antique and I got even more panicked when I skimmed through the 8 page manual that kept on talking about the card's specifications without any reference to the driver functionnalities and means of use !!! This was announcing a "Bug and Pray" install...

Surprisingly, the Install program worked great, all had to do was to indicate to the driver what was the memory I/O range I selected on the DIP switch. No IRQ is used up and the Card takes up DMA adresses in the 5/6/7 range (rarely used by soundcards.) The card appeared as a Windows sound card and a Prodif24 control program icon popped up in the Windows control panel.  Strangely, no Prodif24 hardware appears in the System/device manager nor does it indicates what ressources it eats up. Strange, strange, what kind of hardware is that thing.... but who cares ? At last it worked...

Honestly, my first fears faded off when accessed for the firtst time the Prodif control panel. You choose your input format and here you go: the Prodif syncs automatically and the input meters goes up. I got my first crystal clear recording session onto my hard disk with zero generation loss. The Prodif has kept it's promises flawlessly.

I used the Prodif's high quality 18 bit analog output as the default soundcard in my system replacing my old Audiotrix which was clearly outdated (anyway whatever analog signal I would record would go through my Promix  A/D converters first.). That's a great idea BUT the Prodif isn't meant to work like that: this sound card is DEDICATED to Digital transfers and works very well indeed when it comes to record and playback BUT:

It supports only 32, 44.1 or 48 Khz sampling rates even with it's analog output. Goodby Windows system and multimedia sounds with low sampling rates... In those cases the Prodif outputs... silence.

It isn't Full Duplex even if it is rated to "Playback while Record". Indeed you can monitor what your are actually recording BUT you can't monitor what your are recording while you output something else from your hard disk. You can choose in the control Panel to monitor what your are recording OR what your are playing back as a wave file. There isn't a mixer to playback previous track while listening what you are recording: you CAN'T use the Prodif24 to do Multi-track recording !!!

The Prodif24 has been reported to conflict hardly with AWE32 cards by a few friends of mine. They have tested all the settings possible and haven't managed to get their Prodif recognized by their system. The solution came with getting rid of their Sound Blaster out of their computer. May this be THE solution for all the problem you get with the SB series cards ???

All in all, this card is great as dedicated, low-cost and high performance digital transfer soundcard for people who own a DAT or some other digital equipment and who want to get them in their PC for editing facilities. It can also be used as a dedicated recording and playback port but is NOT suited for multi-track recording. This is no multipurpose acquisition card for home-studio's and for the price I paid it, I must admit I was disappointed. I got the sound card back at the store a week later arguing it wasn't exaclty what I wanted. I skimmed the other products that would suit my needs and this time I went for the Turtle Beach Fiji with it's Digital I/O daughterboard. It was more like a high quality soundcard with an integrated mixer and 20 bit analog in and out's. Hope this one will satisfy me completly... At last...

Specifications