James Jarvis
March 9, 2009

Rating: 10/10

I bought this soundcard to replace a 5 year old emu 0404 which I used everday. Whilst the 0404 was a brilliant card and served me well it did have a couple of problems. Drivers were huge and caused a couple of problems. Their latest drivers also cause odd latency spikes. The esi\'s drivers are a few kb vs many mbs.
Sound quality is top banana, the timber and detail of instruments is so musical and realistic.
Note that I use this card purely as a source for my hifi, which feeds into my amplifier using ASIO. I always disliked the emu 0404s bright tendency, its subtle but it always bothered me.
The fact that this card has built in rca and quarter inch outputs is a massive plus.
Stable, no driver or peak meter clipping issues, just pure beautiful music.

Piotr Szczepaniak
January 25, 2009

Rating: 7/10

I bought this card to replace my E-MU 0404 which had always suffered from driver problems and two years of time was not enough for the manufacturer to make it better. So here she comes…Juli@

To be honest, I decided to buy ESI Juli@ card after reading several favourable opinions regarding drivers, latency and overall stability. It’s all true. If you are seeking a simple, PCI audio interface with rock solid drivers and really LOW latency (this means 5.8 ms which is absolutely fine for in-software monitoring or playing midi instruments) – this card has no competition in its price range.

It is easy to install, drivers are small and trouble free so far. This means no need for frequent updates/re-installations/etc. Oh, and it looks nice too!! The bundled software pack seems promising, but I haven’t tried anything yet as I already have loads of plugins.

Of course, it does not offer multiple ins- and outs but this is not that price range. It’s an excellent solution for a recording solo artist / electronic musician. Or in a mixing setup (just like mine). The converters offer very good parameters, nothing to complain about in this matter.

The only serious and annoying drawback is the flimsy digital breakout cable…can’t find words for such a major flaw in an overall excellent design.

To sum up – at this price you won’t find a more stable audio solution for your computer. Period.

SSamuels
January 4, 2008

Rating: 5/10

I bought this card for recording live music, replacing an Audigy ZS2 which has no provision for the digital input coming out of my stomp box. Line levels were ok but wanted to try going fully digital. I reviewed a wide range of cards but settled on the Juli@ for the balanced/unbalanced input options and the highest quality sampling rate. And, for those reasons, it would score very highly. The sound of an acoustic guitar is much more natural than my old gamers card, and the ASIO drivers allowed me to get down to a very low latency, even on a restricted speed/memory machine. So why only 5 out of 10? Quite simply, it's the MIDI/digital breakout cable connection. It is absolutely shocking - cheap, loose and constantly requiring checking as the contact is so flimsy. For the sake of another few quid, ESI could have provided a lockable plug and socket that would be much more robust and in keeping with the quality of the rest of the card. A real disappointment on an otherwise excellent piece of kit.