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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
