Linux Hi-Fi Audio Card?

[skreet]

I have a SB Live! and in linux there are so many mixer settings it's way too confusing (call me stupid if you'd like). Is there a better linux-supported card that'll output the clarity I crave?

 

[bersl2]

What do you mean by "clarity"? You could sure use some of that in your post.

 

[T3C]

What exactly are you looking for here?

 

[Nothinman]

SBLive is one of the best supported IMO, it does hardware mixing which is something that a lot of card don't do these days.

 

[skreet]

Yea the hardware mixing is nice, but have any of you used a 4.1 or 5.1 setup on this card? I mean for example the Master only controls the front speakers volume. And the PCM doesn't affect the surround volume much.. It just feels so.. beta.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Originally posted by: skreet
Yea the hardware mixing is nice, but have any of you used a 4.1 or 5.1 setup on this card? I mean for example the Master only controls the front speakers volume. And the PCM doesn't affect the surround volume much.. It just feels so.. beta.

I have used it in both a 4.1 and a 5.1 setup, and it does seem to be much more difficult to set the volumes the way I want with the 5.1 setup (I have to plug the front, rear, and center speakers in separately, hence the additional mixer controls). The 4.1 setup controlled the surround on it's own while being plugged into only one output from the sound card. I do have controls on the center speaker to control it all, though, so that helps a lot.

It would be nice if one could lock the PCM and Wave Surround volumes to the Master volume so it would control them all.

 

[bersl2]

Originally posted by: skreet
Yea the hardware mixing is nice, but have any of you used a 4.1 or 5.1 setup on this card? I mean for example the Master only controls the front speakers volume. And the PCM doesn't affect the surround volume much.. It just feels so.. beta.

All cards have different quirks, and the only way of normalizing these quirks is through the .asoundrc file, which is for all intensive purposes unintelligible. Yes, this does appear to be a hole in the user interface AFAIK. It looks like some project needs to create a good abstraction layer to the hardware mixer controls that takes into account these quirks.

I mean, I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (cs46xx), and nobody seems to know how to mirror the front channels to the rear channels for 2 channel only audio. We know it would be done using asoundrc, but nobody has a clue how this would be done.

 

[skreet]

Heh well, glad to know I'm not the only Linux user that would like to see improvment in the drivers and mixer apps.

 

[Nothinman]

You never even mentioned which driver you were using, ALSA or OSS.

 

[skreet]

Nothinman: Anyone who still uses OSS is living in the dark ages, imho.

 

[drag]

When using alsa mixing apps like alsamixer you can get lots of mixers that seem like gibberish..

This is because the app is representing actual mixing interfaces on the card itself. All those things generally have 'real' representations in your hardware.

So in a very feature-full card like Audigy or soundblaster series it can be confusing. I have a audigy that I've used for a while..

If you want the 'best' sound in linux you can go with a semi-pro card based on the Envy24 chipset. I have a M-audio Audiofile 2496 that is very nice...

Trouble is that those types of cards don't support hardware mixing.. they do nice things like have midi in and out, and multiple clock rates that Audigy can't realy do, but in order to get multiple apps to have sound at the same time you have to use a sound server or the alsa dmix plugin.

Very nice sound though..

These sound cards have their own special envy24control application that gives you pretty nice control over them. They are very feature rich.

If you want something that is cheaper look for the various envy24ht-based cards. There are a few very nice sounding setups you can get for 20-40 dollars. Still have to do the dmix/sound server dance though.

The nice thing about the Audigy/sound blaster stuff is that it's well supported and does the mixing all in hardware, which is very nice for gaming and running many multimedia apps at once. It's very hands-off no-sweat type of thing.

 

[Nothinman]

Nothinman: Anyone who still uses OSS is living in the dark ages, imho.

It's only been deprecated for 1 major release and it's still being updated. IMO the emu10k1 OSS driver is better than the ALSA one, it's simpler and 'just works'. I use ALSA on my notebook with it's crappy i810 audio but I still have the OSS driver loaded on my home machine because I see no reason to switch to ALSA yet.

 

[corkyg]

You can always consider the new Soundblaster Audigy 2NX (External USB) - small, compact, and simple to use. Good for Linux and does 5.1 and 7.1. And, you can move it from machine to machine without opening up anything. I am using it on my laptop at present.

2NX

 

[keltor]

Personally, I like FireWire for my audio. I am using for my everyday sound a FireWire Solo from M-Audio. Going to www.alsa-project.org and looking at the sound card list will help a lot as it will let you know how well supported any particular card is. Also the trend in high end audio cards is to remove the hardware mixers as they provide too many limitations and well 2% CPU power to allow easily mixing sound from 2 sources is nice.

1 last note is that all the USB devices that are based on EZ-USB (which is pretty much all of them) don't support 24bit/96Khz except by having the DAC resample the stream from the audio processor from 16bit/48Khz (or 44Khz).

 

[skreet]

Keltor: Ha-ha I made you sign up!

Thanks for the options everyone, good thread