I decided to purchase M-Audio Revolution 5.1 to finally shed myself of the utterly hopeless integrated soundcard of my ASUS motherboard, only to be disappointed with what I thought would be a very professional product. My complaint isn't about the hardware though, it's the software.

The only drivers I can find for the M-Audio Revolution is now four years old. Four! This is not exactly what I expected, when even the crappy integrated soundcards release drivers more frequently than this.

Is there something I'm missing here? Are the drivers flawless and haven't needed any update, or am I just not looking in the right places?

Is there a problem with the card? Does it work correctly?

If it worked on XP in 2004, there is little reason it needs to be changed to work on XP in 2008. Barring a WU that messes with something, the drivers should be static.

I would worry more about a product that issues many driver updates than one that does not.

Audio cards should not need to go thru the endless "upgrade" cycle some other HW products seem to go through.

M-Audio updated the Revolution drivers for Vista, if the XP drivers needed an update, I am sure they would have updated them also.

My M-Audio Delta has been running the same drivers on Win 2k for 6 years and I have never had a need to "upgrade".

I have that card on my HTPC and my normal pc, and am running MCE 2004 and XP Pro. The drivers are rock solid and I have never had a problem once I got things installed. That was the first time I ever had hadware that had to have the software installed FIRST, then the card.

Once I figured that out, everything has been flawless on both PCs.

I also have this card. As long as you have the driver CD that came with the card, you're fine. As another poster mentioned, there's no need to update drivers, simply for the sake of having updated drivers. The saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here; in this case, I've never ran into an issue with the card's software, although I admittedly don't use Windows much any more. Granted, it's arguably less feature-rich than Creative's offerings, but the features it does have are far more useful than Creative's bloated, often useless add-ons and "enhancements".

To me, the lack of updated drivers shows a lack of effort and follow-up from the company more than anything. One thing I particularly missed right off the bat was the ability to record the card's output directly on my computer. I could easily do this with my old integrated card. A feature such as that I would have expected with driver/software updates, but alas, there are none.

Sure it -works great-, and that's fine and dandy, but when the drivers and software haven't received as much as a touch-up in nearly half a decade, I feel kind of 'overlooked'.

So there's a problem that M-Audio got the drivers RIGHT early on?

If it works why should they release updates? Too break something that already works?

I think the original poster has entirely missed the point of driver updates. The point is to fix something that's wrong... and if nothing is wrong there is no point in releasing an update just for the sake of releasing updates more often.

So in fact you could say that people that release a lot of driver updates are far worse since they have taken many attempts to get it right and as such are less likely to have gotten the driver entirely right yet given their track record.

I totally agree with this. Good companies do not release updates just for the sake of releasing an update. For example, the last driver update for the RME Hammerfall series is 12/2005 (to fix a bug), so I guess according to the OP, RME is not a good company either..

Charles

Regarding your desire to record the card's output, couldn't you simply split the line-out for the channel(s) in question and feed that into the line-in (assuming you simply want to record/store an analog signal) ?

I could, but I shouldn't have to (seeing as I didn't with far inferior cards), and that's kind of the point.

I see I've been made quite the laughing stock for expecting a company to care and follow up on their products. Funny. If new drivers aren't needed, then fine - I accept that - but it certainly is not what I expected as driver updates seems like such a natural progression to me.

The thing is that with Realtek HD Audio (onboard chip), the signal is recorded as PCM BEFORE it even goes to DAC. That means, if the recording volume is right and the PCM format is the same, it records bit-identically...
As I remember, even the OEM SB Live 5.1 had a mixer option of "What you hear" to directly record played-back content without DAC/EMI/ADC crippling it.

Like that 64bit beta (only ones for 64bit) drivers from 2005 for the audiophile 2496 that only gives ground noise? I can't say they work too much on their drivers.

All good soundcards have separate DSP processor and one or more digital-analogue converters. Whether the DSP provides "Stereo Out" source depends on drivers. This is not exclusive to Realtek (may it burn in hell). Semi-pro level AP2496 and E-MU Audio Systems can loopback the mix back to recording. On my cheap Yamaha "Stereo Out" is most likely provided by the DAC, as there is some noise.

I agree that lack of Stereo Out is a disadvantage. Maybe this card is not the best choice for you then?

I've actually encountered what I consider to be a serious bug, though I don't know what causes it. It seems almost random. Suddenly I start hearing noise/static coming from nowhere. All audio sources could be closed, or one or more can be running (foobar, media player classic, etc.) but none of them are the source of the static. Any audio which is playing is pitched down and up randomly. Eventually, if left unchecked, the audio will pitch further and further down until it simply dies out and I can't get any sound from the card at all. After a cold boot, everything seems to be fine, but the bug seems to reappear after a while.

That sounds more as that your soundcard is picking up interference from something else inside your computer than anything else.

If that was the case, then the only interfering component I can think of would be my graphics card (ATI Radeon X1900GT), but I can't imagine -why-. I've actually found now that whenever I "restart" the audio by re-opening Foobar and playing a song the static disappears and the pitching returns to normal. This bug is really doing my head in... :/

With my old soundcard I used to hear my harddrives spinning through my speakers and I used to get strange sounds from moving my mouse across the screen.

I don't really know what I could have done to actually solve it, but wheb I upgraded and started using an external dac and it went away.

That's really odd. When you say "pitched up and down" I guess you mean the volume, not the frequency? I know on my old Audigy 2 ZS, I got noise from my DVD drive whenever it read a disc; disconnecting the audio cable running to it fixed that; apparently those are great at picking up noise.