The Maxi Studio ISIS has a split personality. The card itself has little 1/8" mini jacks like one of those peewee little "game" cards. There's another little thingy (not a daughterboard, but perhaps a niece-board?) that attaches to the card via a ribbon cable. It takes up a position on the back (but doesn't actually occupy a card slot), and connects via a DIN cable to a breakout box. This is where the audio stuff happens. The analog and digital audio ins and outs are on one side, and (oddly, I thought), the DIN cable and the MIDI ports connect on t'other side.
Traditionally, a "consumer soundcard" has an onboard synth, and those lame little 1/8" mini-jacks. A "pro audio card" (see reviews of pro audio cards) has no synth, and it has proper connectors, usually by way of a breakout box. The Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS has both, so it may be an attractive buy for someone who wants to do audio recording, but also wants to do games or kids' CD-ROMs (or whatever it is that people with "soundcards" do).
Not that the ISIS is lacking on the audio side. I tested out the ISIS by archiving some 8-track reels in a digital audio format. That was such a nightmarish project that I wrote a whole article about it, but the ISIS card worked fine throughout. Installation was no problem. When I opened up Cakewalk and SAW, there was the ISIS on the list of audio devices, ready to go. Sound quality was fine, at least according to the old ear test.
The only major complaint I had was the software mixer app. Mine flickered on and off like blinking text on a Web page - disconcerting, to say the least. Despite this buggy behavior (which I'm told has been fixed with the latest driver version), it seems to work fine except for one thing. There's a little check box that you must use to select whether channels 7 and 8 use the analog inputs or the digital S/PDIF inputs. For my 8-track transfer project, I wanted to use the analog inputs, so I had to tick the little box accordingly. Okay, it took me hours to figure that out, which I admit was due to my own typical manual-what-manual? behavior. However, once I had selected the analog inputs, the darn thing sometimes mysteriously reset itself to use the digital ones, requiring me to open the app and reset the darn thing more often than I would have wished.
So, if they can fix the mixer app, I'd say they have a winner here. It works as advertised, and is a good little workhorse card. I must say, however, that I have reservations about the 8-in, 4-out format. Other gadgets, like the Frontier Zulu, have a 4-in, 8-out arrangement, which makes a lot more sense. The usual reason for wanting multiple outs is because you want to mix outside the computer, so you want as many as possible. The usual reason for multiple ins is to be able to record lots of instruments (or tape tracks, in my case) at one time. But think about it - any time you're recording 8 tracks, you'll want to be able to play back 8 tracks too, if only to check your tracks to make sure they sound right. If you only have 4 outputs, this means you'll have to submix some of the tracks in software - which is exactly the situation that we're trying to avoid by having multiple outs. So it seems to me that a card should have at least as many outs as ins, if not more. Does this make sense to anyone else?
This is obviously intended to be a jack-of-all-trades, a card for all seasons. The ISIS is "compatible with all open standards," including General MIDI, MPU-401, Soundblaster, and so on. It claims to be compatible with all games, even old DOS ones. And you get a decent little audio and MIDI card, too. Wotta deal!
The Maxi Studio ISIS has a split personality. The card itself has little 1/8" mini jacks like one of those peewee little "game" cards. There's another little thingy (not a daughterboard, but perhaps a niece-board?) that attaches to the card via a ribbon cable. It takes up a position on the back (but doesn't actually occupy a card slot), and connects via a DIN cable to a breakout box. This is where the audio stuff happens. The analog and digital audio ins and outs are on one side, and (oddly, I thought), the DIN cable and the MIDI ports connect on t'other side.