Re: high quality sound card ???
On Tuesday 21 Aug 2007, helices wrote:
> I am looking to add a high quality sound card to my amd64 system.
>
> Obviously, I want it supported on in Etch.
>
> Please, advise ...
If you really want quality, you want external. Any sound card that is sharing
a power supply with the computer will be inherently noisy, since the noise
performance of an A-to-D converter depends heavily on the power supply. If
the sound chip is soldered to the motherboard itself, then it will be even
noisier due to stray signals being coupled in inductively and capacitively as
well as via the power supply.
I have an Alesis MultiMix USB 8 mixer. This has 4 mono inputs (XLR and 6.3,
adjustable gain for mic/line and pan) and 2 stereo inputs (6.3, line
level), and a built-in effects processor. (No magnetic cartridge inputs with
RIAA EQ, but you can produce a reasonable approximation using the low-level
inputs and setting the provided three-band controls appropriately.) The A-D
and D-A are wired as though the computer were a 2-track tape recorder -- you
cannot alter any of the mixer controls from the computer, except to adjust
the level fed from the D-to-A to the mix. This mixer is using a Burr-Brown
A-to-D converter and obeys the standard for USB audio devices, so it Just
Works (I did end up creating an alsa configuration file anyway, so that my
audio devices always appear in the same order).
--
AJS
delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk
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