In-depth Feature:
CreamWare Luna II
Utter Lunacy - The Luna II PCI Card
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The Luna II undoubtedly supplies a powerful audio environment.
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Introduction
The Luna II is a PCI card and software environment. The card sports 3 Digital Signal Processors (DSP’s) to remove some of the hard work of audio processing from the host computers CPU.
CreamWare have a range of products utilising a common architecture. Plug-ins for Luna II are compatible with the higher specification Pulsar/SCOPE platform.
Getting Connected
The card comes supplied as a relatively small PCI card suitable for Mac or PC. This review concentrates on the PC version. The supplied CD includes ASIO 2.0, EASI, DirectSound, MME, tripleDAT, GigaSampler, SoundManager and OMS drivers. Also included on the disk are a number of software applications – the first of these is the Luna II software used to set up the sound environment. The other two packages both require separate licenses and comprise the Elektra Modular 2.0 (+/- $170) modular synthesiser and the PowerSampler STS3000 sampler (+/- $170).
The card sports a healthy range of connectors. Specifically Two analogue IO’s as 3/4 (6.3 mm) stereo jacks. Two digital IO’s in S/PDIF format as 1/8 (3.7mm) stereo jack. MIDI in and out.
A further Z-Link connector unique to CreamWare allows further expansion:
Optional Luna 2496 I/O break-out box providing 8 analogue inputs and 8 analogue outputs on RCA jacks. Optional ADAT I/O extension board. This occupies a spare slot opening in your computer, but does not require a PCI slot.
Driver installation is straightforward using standard Windows plug-and-play support. Installing the card brings up the “Add New Hardware” wizard, and drivers install easily. On the test system, there were some problems initially getting the drivers working, but these seemed to be resolved by downloading new drivers from the CreamWare website.
Also provided is an installation guide. All other documentation is supplied in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF files) on the CD.
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