E-mu 1616M (2005)
E-mu's CardBus card slips into a laptop's PCMCIA slot and turns it into a desktop-grade studio — provided you can still find a laptop with a PCMCIA slot.
Overview
The 1616M is a laptop audio interface built around a CardBus card that plugs into a notebook's PCMCIA slot, with a breakout MicroDock handling the physical connections. E-mu announced it in 2005 at $699.99, alongside a cheaper sibling, the 1616, at $599.99. The headline claim, repeated across E-mu's own advertising and echoed in the press, was that the M variant's mastering-grade 24-bit/192 kHz converters with a 120 dB signal-to-noise ratio were unique among laptop interfaces at any price.
The architecture is the interesting part. The CardBus card alone can be used for its hardware-accelerated DSP effects and a stereo headphone/line output, so the interface functions as a dongle-sized effects processor if that's all you need. Plug in the MicroDock and you get the full complement: two Neutrik combo connectors with 48V phantom power and analog soft limiting for mic, line, or instrument-level sources, four TRS line inputs, a turntable input, six TRS line outputs, 5.1 speaker outputs, ADAT, S/PDIF, and AES/EBU digital I/O, two headphone/line outputs, and two MIDI inputs and outputs. E-mu's own advertising listed 16 audio inputs and 16 audio outputs with 32-channel MIDI in and out, matching the company's PCI-based 1820 system — the 1616M is essentially that desktop system's I/O and DSP in a mobile format.
The DSP is the same hardware-accelerated processing found in E-mu's PCI Digital Audio Systems, and the bundle reflected it: the 1616M shipped with E-mu's full complement of effects plug-ins plus the Proteus-X LE soft synth, and with software from Steinberg, Ableton, IK Multimedia, Minnetonka, and Cakewalk. Windows 2000 and XP were the supported platforms, with WDM and ASIO drivers. EQ Magazine (November 2005, p.68) noted that CardBus-based pro audio interfaces were rare by then — with Echo's Layla Laptop system discontinued, the field was thin, and interfaces in that format typically topped out at 96 kHz with a limited I/O selection. The 1616M's 192 kHz conversion and full MicroDock complement put it in a different class.
That rarity cuts both ways. The CardBus format is the 1616M's defining strength and its practical limitation: PCMCIA slots disappeared from laptops through the late 2000s, so the interface is now tied to a specific generation of notebooks. The converters, though, are the reason to seek one out — Sound on Sound (July 2006, p.33) noted that E-mu's 'M' series cards used the same 24-bit/192 kHz converters as Digidesign's multi-thousand-pound Pro Tools HD systems, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about a $699 laptop interface.
The 1616M's place in the E-mu story is as the mobile extension of the company's PCI systems — the 1820's I/O and DSP, shrunk into a CardBus card and a dock. The bundled software and the CardBus dependency mean it's not a plug-and-play purchase in the modern sense, but for what it is — a 24/192 laptop interface with hardware DSP and a genuinely complete I/O set — it remains one of the more interesting artifacts of E-mu's transition from sampler maker to digital audio system vendor.
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