How can this success be explained? In contrast to many other manufacturer's offering similar products, RME is an innovative company. We don't only 'put chips on a board' (as the manufacturer Soundscape puts it), but we develop and realize new and innovative ideas. RME has in the meantime issued so many detail solutions that we don't care about copies of them (made by companies 'putting chips on a board') anymore. Our advantage still remains, thanks to permanently upcoming new ideas and improved products.
Care for an example? RME is the only manufacturer not to use a third party FireWire audio technology. All other manufacturers use dedicated all-in-one FireWire audio chips. As a result, their access to bugfixes and improvements is more than limited. Our own firewire audio core combinates pro audio features, an outstanding performance and all unique RME features, like TotalMix, minimal latencies with on-the-fly latency changes and much more.
Competition efforts, to copy our technology and ideas, are a strong motivation to move on and keep our leading edge with new ideas and outstanding products.
Not only RME hardware owns the reputation of reference, but the quality attribute applies also to the RME software package, especially the RME driver family.
When we conquered the NT market in 1997 with our first digital audio cards, RME was the only company on the market to offer NT drivers worth-while considering, and of course NT is the OS of choice for reliable industrial use. Since the first days it´s a tradition, to deliver stable drivers with an outstanding performance for all important operation systems. This holds true not only for the hard and expensive daily routine in studios, where the hardware simply has to work without any hassles. No more, but also no less! Other companies neglect this fact and developed elaborate and costly DSP systems, with a lot features on paper, but were never be up to the hard production life.
But this also holds true especially for broadcast and television, where the task is to work around the clock without a break. And what's the use of drivers knitted with a hot needle, if they lead to a software crash after 3 or 6 hours of permanent running? RME's cards and drivers never had problems with memory holes or overrunning counters. At the WDR (West German Broadcast) for instance, a DIGI96/8 PRO has not been stopped for more than a year (in the pilot project VERA, computer-generated traffic information around the clock.)
The following list is far from being complete. Even we have sort of lost track in the meantime, our products apparently being used even in the most remote places in the world. Some of the below mentioned companies use some of our cards in their own equipment, the brand name RME is not obvious. Others use cards with changed labels (OEM), modified cards, or even cards developed especially for them, which RME does not offer officially. For privacy reasons we will not indicate, which company is using which products. But you can be reassured - these companies use by far more than only one card - or two ...