Juan R.D. Silva writes:
The headphone jack failed on my Dell M4800 laptop. I need to find reliable with decent stereo audio output External USB Sound Card/Audio Adapter with 3.5mm Stereo Headphone (3 pole plug) and Mono Microphone (nice to have) Jacks. It should be available in North America.
Back when I wanted an USB sound card, I bought"Creative Sound Blaster PLAY! 3" [1]. It works out of the box with Debian stable (back then it was Debian 10) and PulseAudio+ALSA. I did not check if any of the advertised advanced audio functionality (higher sampling rate etc.) work under LInux. Note also, that I used this with a desktop-style system and thus do not know about its power consumption.
I gather it is one of the more expensive ones. From my (limited) experience the audio quality is decent and it has a nice extra feature: The headphone plug supports 3-pole plugs as well as 4-pole plugs. I.e.: If you want to use your smartphone's 4-pole headset, it will work, too. It also has a dedicated microphone jack to use for "regular" PC headsets.
AFAICT, it should be available in America. I bought my one from a retail store in Germany, though.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/creative-sound-blaster-play-3/p/N82E16829102100 HTH and YMMV Linux-Fan öö [...]
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