Ten years ago, when musicians started to turn away from all their DA-88's and ADAT's, and began to seriously get into computer-based recording, companies like MOTU and RME Hammerfall responded by producing elaborate sound cards with a dozen inputs and outputs; and price tags that touched the thousands of dollars. It was then that companies like Tascam and M-Audio began to see that these weren't what the home musician needed - that all of this was just overkill. The home musician, with a couple of guitars, synthesizers, and a computer, really just wanted a simple sound card. He didn't need 12 inputs on a sound card. The home musician could just plug everything into a mixer and just plug the mixer's stereo output into the sound card. All home musicians needed was a sound card that had two inputs and outputs for their analog audio and a pair of inputs and outputs for any software synthesizers they had. They wanted quality audio, they wanted practically no latency, they didn't want any frills, and they wanted it cheap. This was the kind of market that the M-Audio 2496 sound card was designed to cater to.
Ever heard of the old saw that promotes quality over quantity? The M-Audio 2496 sound card is a personification of that principle. It is very minimalist in most areas, except for where features would count. The 2496 is an internal PCI card. The rear of the card has a pair of stereo RCA inputs and outputs on goldplated jacks, and a D-Sub port where you connect the breakout cable for S/PDIF digital audio and a MIDI input and output. Once the drivers are installed and your card is up and running, you'll find that going with such a well-established card has its advantages. Just about every DAW and software synth will work on it right away, with its WDM and ASIO drivers. The latency goes down to 5ms on most applications, and the sound quality is spectacular.
If you don't have professional music aspirations, you could easily use this card as a high-end audio accelerator. Even iTunes stuff on your computer at 128kbps is bound to sparkle like you've never heard it before. Does this card have everything you want? Certainly, it doesn't have a headphone jack; and all it has are RCA audio outs. If you need to plug in headphones, you really will be put to a little trouble buying a mixer or at least an adapter.
The driver comes with a control panel utility that allows you to route your signals in almost every way possible. You'd be surprised how much you can do with just four inputs and four outputs. Of course, this isn't like some of those modern USB sound cards out there that are priced more or less the same as the M-Audio 2496 sound card. You don't get mic. preamps, for instance. But since musicians are the kind of customer likely to require microphone preamps, this isn't really much of a problem. Most musicians have at least one preamp on a mixer of some kind.
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