[Seb]

I work as an acoustic consultant in Sydney. I mainly get involved in building acoustics - eg sound insulation between rooms (residential apartments, plantrooms, speech privacy between offices, whatever), indoor airconditioning noise, intrusion of external noise (mainly transportation noise such as rail, traffic, aircraft).

recently I have been involved in design of a couple of large studios and have taken an interest in finding out more about room acoustic design and being able to design studios myself from scratch.

recently I tested 3 external soundcards (freq resp only) for use with REQW.

Presonus Inspire 1394. Line connections worked v well (very flat down to 10Hz). Microphone preamps rolled off a lot below 100hz (-3dB points were 57Hz, 21kHz at 44k sampling).

Edirol UA-5. Both line connections and mic preamps worked v well. v flat down to about 10Hz.

Edirol UA-25. Same.

I was attracted to the idea of an external soundcard with a built-in mic pre-amp so I would have the option of plugging in a SLM (a 'real' one) or a cheap mic like the ECM8000 and not have to carry to site an extra box (ie an external mic pre-amp).