esi maya44 pci

The ESI Maya44 is a PCI card with:

• 4×4 analogue in/out.
• 24 bit/192kHz output, 96kHz input
• 48V phantom power
• SPDIF/optical output

Optional expansion card adds:

• MIDI I/O
• SPDIF input

Costs around 70UKP. Not seen the expansion card on sale anywhere.

• Supported in ALSA by snd-ice1724 module
• A driver is mentioned on Ubuntu Forums, but capabilities are not clear.
• Emutrix Mixer for EMU cards. 0404 PCI support in V0.3 (SVN)
• Kernel documentation details what should be working (see below), but has not been updated since 2008. ALSA Developer list hints that some fixes have been applied

From the README.maya44, as of February 2008:

The following functions work, as tested by Rainer Zimmermann and Piotr Makowski:

• playback and capture at all sampling rates
• input/output level
• crossmixing
• line/mic switch
• phantom power switch
• analogue monitor a.k.a bypass

The following functions *should* work, but are not fully tested:

• Channel 3+4 analogue - S/PDIF input switching
• S/PDIF output
• all inputs/outputs on the M/IO/DIO extension card
• internal/external clock selection

Things that do not seem to work:

• The level meters (“multi track”) in 'alsamixer' do not seem to react to signals in (if this is a bug, it would probably be in the existing ICE1724 code).
• Ardour 2.1 seems to work only via JACK, not using ALSA directly or via OSS. This still needs to be tracked down.

• ALSA ESI page
• Sound on Sound review Actually for the Audiotrak Maya44, but seems to be the essentially the same card. Conclusion is that it is good value for a 4 channel card, but audio quality not as good as others, e.g. Delta 44
• Ardour forum discussion of how alsamixer channels relate to the interface
• Forum discussion 1
• Forum discussion 2