I have and old REM Digi96/8 Pad working very well with a 8in daughter card on my old desktop PC. Before to get rid of it, I made a search and found that :
A PCI (not PCI-E) to expresscard
General Features
With this expansion kit, you can use your PCI card on your laptop computer.
Must through express slot on your laptop, this is NOT a USB to PCI adapter box.
Ø It allows you to plug-in up to two (2) full-sized PCI cards
Ø PCI Specification 2.2 Specification compliant
Ø Provides easy connection to laptop computers
Ø Expansion slot: two (2) full-sized PCI slots
Ø PCI Bus: 32 bit 33MHz
Ø Supports 170mm length of PCI card
Ø Aluminium alloy enclosure
Ø Power Input: 12V DC input
Ø Includes 1-meter expansion cable
Ø No drivers required
OS support Windows 2000 / 2008 / XP / Vista / Win7 / Win8 / LINUX
Price is $119.90, I took the risk and I'll tell you the results....
It works, but I need some more testing to ensure that the perfs are ok. There are also pci-e risers (that's how these systems are called). I don't know if modern laptops have expresscard ports, good question.
So...
PCI speed is 133Mb/s
PCI-E is up to 16 Gb/s
USB2 is 480Mb/s
USB3 is 4 Gb/s
so PCI to USB seems ok, but PCI-E to USB (even USB 3 or USB3.1) seems harder. Even if PCI-E soundcards don't need such transfer rates, there should be a "speed control" circuit somewhere. Actually, all the risers I've seen are using USB3 but also a mini pci-e connector. This one needs to be internally connected, so must of time you'll have to open your laptop, take away your wifi unit which is often plugged on the mini pci-e slot and replace it with the riser connecter, find a path for the cable to the outside of the laptop, and try to make it work... Such risers are used for connecting various bitcoins mining cards or graphic cards. So I'm not sure for PCI-e...
There's no need to open a laptop if it has an Expresscard slot (Expresscard slots are compatible with PCI-e x1), you can use an external adapter for PCI-e cards like this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/112116083244
But why PCI-e (rather than plain PCI), I thought there aren't any PCI-e studio soundcards that work with Linux?
I would not recommend PCI or PCIe to USB adapters (assuming they even exist) as that likely will add a lot of overhead and therefore latency.
I agree, but as said before in the thread, there are less and less expresscard ports on laptops. There are indeed very few pci-e cards working under linux, except maybe some rme hdspe series.
This said, a pci hdsp96/52 working on laptops would be a fantastic basis to build a 24 tracks recording studio.
I actually completely bypassed the problem by using a 20 channel desktop mixer which has a SPDIF output (Soundcraft M12), so all I need on the Linux PC is a single SPDIF input.
These days there are also many desktop mixers with built in USB audio interface (some are even multichannel, not just the stereo mix output) which also avoid the need of a soundcard.
Last edited by tux99 on Tue Mar 27, 2018 6:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
tux99 wrote:I actually completely bypassed the problem by using a 20 channel desktop mixer which has a SPDIF output (Soundcraft M12), so all I need on the Linux PC is a single SPDIF input.
These days there are also many desktop mixers with built in USB audio interface (some are even multichannel, not just the stereo mix output) which also avoid the need of a soundcard.
