Ben Sparks said: > I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and I've heard that ALSA support for > the card is not any better than what is available in the kernel. I'm > about to recompile mykernel with support for my card. I know it uses > the Crystal Soundfusion cs461x driver is there any thing else that I > need to add?
I have this card and am thoroughly disappointed by it till now. The kernel driver provides very poor sound and also lacks concurrent sound so only one application can use it at any one time; applications will often complain that it doesn't allow the application to configure small enough sound fragments and so gaming sound is aweful. ALSA although overcomes these problems has a multichannel bug where either 5.1 sound doesn't provide any bass whatsoever or one or more speakers are mute; this hasn't been fixed in rc7 either. Search on forums for details of problems that people have had. Also, I had quite a few problems when I discontinued the use of ALSA in favour of kernel sound. Package installations were failing left, right and centre because they were looking for alsa libraries which weren't there. I guess it is to be expected since I didn't recompile the entire system with USE=-alsa. Luckily, there's a third alternative: http://www.opensound.com provides an effective driver for this card at a cost but there is also a time limited trial of the driver for download. This driver I believe overcomes the drawbacks of the above two (kernel + alsa) but my personal experience with these drivers was hellish: beware that when you start the sound after driver installation it will start at full volume and after every fresh boot it will start at full volume. My solution will be to switch to a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Digital or an Audigy 1 as soon as I've decided between them. Creative seems to have the best driver support. Any help on deciding between an SBLive 5.1 Digital and an Audigy 1 would be much appreciated with regard to good driver support for 5.1 sound. Many thanks Dhruba Bandopadhyay -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
