New Sound card needed, recommendations? (Linux only machine)

[Abzstrak]

ok, I need to buy a new sound card for a system I'm building. I need it to only give comparable audio quality to the sb live. I only need 4 speaker output, although 4.1 and 5.1 would be nice.

The most important feature I need is VERY VERY low CPU useage.

btw, the system will ONLY be running linux, I'll use either OSS, ALSA, vendor support, whatever... dont care....

I'm thinking my best bet is probably the sblive 5.1, any other ideas/comments?

 

[Brig]

Just a comment...I've been using the SBLive for quite a while, and have been very pleased with it, so I'd probably stick with the company for my next sound upgrade.

 

[BigNeko]

Use the link I posted in the topic "Trying to decide. Great sound overview at Toms."
Should answer all your questions.

 

[Abzstrak]

BigNeko,
I read that article already, but there is absolutely no mention of linux anywhere in it, and since the qualtiy of the drivers can have as big a performance impact as the hardware itself, I failed to get any useful info from it for this task.

 

[Cosmo3]

Get a Santa Cruz and you will not be disapointed. They are great soundcards, they work well with Windows XP, they have great drivers. Turtle Beach had Windows XP drivers out 2 months before Creative Labs did. Get the Santa Cruz and you won't have the bugs and problems many but not all people have with the Creative Labs soundcards. You can get them once in a while on sale at Comp USA for 59.95 which is a great deal. Also the new drivers have very low cpu usage. Opps sorry about Linux I do not think that they have drivers for that.

 

[BlackOmen]

Any of the SB Live cards would be the best. The OSS drivers included in the kernel are maintained and updated and support many of the features of the card. The ALSA drivers support only a few more features. The 5.1 special feautres aren't supported yet. Getting the Live Drive to work take a little more work. The Live series does a good amount of processing in its own hardware, so CPU usage shouldn't be too bad.

Avoid the audigy at this point as the AlSA drivers are still in development.

 

[nicowju]

I've got an SBLive with my Linux computer. Works great, low CPU utilization