ARTA ending and souncard/interface question

I just read that Ivo is stopping development on ARTA with the final version already published. More than that, he says the the website will stay up into 2025 but no longer. I need to make sure I have the latest version and documents before it all goes away.

The reason I found this out is that I am in the market for a USB sound card/interface because my EMU 0204 died. It was never all that happy with ARTA anyway. What current and not too expensive soundcard/interface suggestions can you make? Of course, it needs to be full duplex,synchronized in and out signal. And I need 2 line inputs for speaker impedance measurement. But perhaps a little less common, I need would like a 5V phantom power, single ended microphone input.

Another alternative would be to change software. REW is OK, but doesn't work as well for speaker measurement. And I would have to buy a USB microphone. Any other choices with ARTA going away?

 

Somewhere on this forum I had a Focusrite Clarett 2Pre on loaner that I've kinda lost track of. If we can find it, you're welcome to give it a try.

 

Why would you need a USB microphone in order to use REW? I have used ARTA ( not very often), REW (more often) and acourate (mostly) all with a Behringer ECM8000 and a Steinberg UR22 and regardless of software it always works

 

That wasn't very clear on my part, sorry. Most people use a UMIK-1 microphone for working with REW. That is a USB mic that plugs directly into your computer and REW can find it and use it. My 30 year old microphone is very similar to your Behringer except that everybody used 5V phantom power instead of the currently popular 48V. It requires a mic pre-amp, ADC, and USB communication to talk to the measurement software. Your Steinberg does that role. These days they call things like your Steinberg "audio interface". In the old days, those were just USB soundcards but I guess Covid got everybody recording their own music at home so the market shifted to things designed for a microphone and an a electric guitar. That's probably good for us because the musicians will want it to sound good, thereby improving the breed.

In the last 24 hours I have realized that I don't have a hope of finding 5V phantom power. I could rig up a simple voltage divider between the "interface" and my old mic and make it work with 48V. I would still have to buy an "interface".

I could buy a new calibrated microphone that takes 48V phantom power and still buy an "interface". That would probably have a more recent calibration than my old mic.

Or I could buy a calibrated UMIK and use REW. To be honest, that doesn't work for me for two reasons. First, you are relying on the computer for handling your signals other than microphone which potentially hurts the accuracy of loudspeaker impedance or distortion measurements, for example. Second, computers are very noisy places. I prefer to have the A/D process in a much quieter environment to get better data. Once it's in digital form, I'm OK with sending to a computer. So I guess I just talked myself into buying an "interface".

@Armaegis - Thanks for the offer of looking for the Clarett. I think along the way I have figured out my next move It would have been interesting to hear the Clarett as it's a nice piece, but I don't really need to do that, so thanks again.

 

@mitochondrium - Just curious. Your Steinberg is one of the few audio interfaces that has a "mix" control. Have you found that valuable doing measurements? If so, how do you use it.

Thanks.

 

You can use a non-USB mic with REW provided you can calibrate SPL independently (with either a mic calibrator or a sound file of known loudness and something like VSLM). For measurements I'm using a little Dayton smartphone mic into the 3.5mm mic input of a Schiit Hel, which has its own ADC.

 

That's cool!

 

@lehmanhill
Ah, yes 5 V phantom power is not standard any more.
I only use the Steinberg in order to do measurements of FR as an input in order to calculate correction filters for DRC. I never tried the mixing tool. I cannot even remember why I sold the UR12 and bought a UR22. Might be I was dreaming about recording in stereo, well that never happened. For my use case it is not even necessary to calibrate in order to know the correct SPL as the only matter of interest is the relative SPLs