Re: [Alsa-user] Looking for USB Card that Records Stereo

[Martin McCormick]

The UCA222 I settled upon to buy came today and it is exactly
what I was looking for.

Thanks to all for the suggestions. 

What I did to test recording was to 

cat /dev/dsp1 >/dev/dsp since neither sound card should have been
active at the time. What you tend to get if you do this is the
left channel of card 1 audible through both channels of Card 0
about 2 seconds after it is sent in to the input of Card 1.

All this tells you is that Card 1, the new one, is
capable of recording and seems to be doing a great job of it.

Thanks, everyone, for all the help.

Martin

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Re: [Alsa-user] Looking for USB Card that Records Stereo

[Martin McCormick]

Bill Unruh  writes:
> > If you want to try a really cheap, but really working one: I have a
> > Behringer ACA222. Not good enough for the Pros and Studios, but I am 
> quite
> 
> UCA222. It seems more or less identical to the UCA202. And the quality is
> actually good. 16 bit 44.1 or 4800 (Note someone who tells you that you 
> need
> 9600 or higher, and 24 bits does not understand sound at all--The 24bit 
> might
> if you are really lucky, buy you and additional 15dB (3 bits) of 
> headroom, but
> almost certainly the rest of your sound chain will add more than 15dB of 
> noise
> anyway (preamps, amps, etc)) . The Behringer is very good and very cheap 
> ( and
> sometimes you can be lucky that the two are not contradictory) sound 
> card. And
> having usb rather than internal saves you from a huge amount of internal
> electronic  noise inside the machine.  The only "problem" is that the
> Behringer has RCA plugs, so you might need to carry around an extra 
> converter
> cable or two.
> The other problem is that the headphone jack is high impedance, so some
> headphones (low impedance) would sound terrible with them.
> 
> > happy with it. USB, stereo line in/out, headphone out. It's all I need 
> for
> > simple digital recording and playback, and to bypass my laptop's 
> inferior
> > internal soundcard.
> 
> Yes. It is way better than those.

Thank you! That sounds like exactly what I was looking for.
No point in perfect killing off very good. Most of the sound
improvement one gets after the samples get wider than 16 bits per
channel is inaudible unless one has extremely good ears and the
sound source is free of noise.

Martin

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[Alsa-user] Looking for USB Card that Records Stereo

[Martin McCormick]

Is there a reasonably-priced USB card with stereo Line
input that works in Linux?

I recently needed to buy one as the second sound card on
a Dell tower running wheezy. A local store which fortunately has
a good return policy sold me a SoundBlaster XG5 which looked like
an excellent possibility until I discovered that it is so
specialized for the gaming market that the only analog audio
input is mono and microphone level to boot. It is a beautiful
device and does have Line in and Line out but they are optical.
Very neat but not what I could use.

Back it went and they were very nice, only asking if it was
broken and not giving me any trouble when I said that it didn't
appear to be broken but would not work for the intended use.

I ordered a FIIO Q1 which is advertised as a portable DAC
and headphone amp. I think the person who recommended it to me
forgot that I needed recording capability and so it
arrived, sounds wonderful, but no recording capability. I'll keep
it because it is not useless, but I wouldn't have bought it had I
known it is another limited-appeal product.

What I am doing is recording audio from two scanner
radios so even a medioker sound card would probably be quite
sufficient but capture capability is an absolute must.

Is what I am looking for that rare these days?

Thanks for any pointers on how to craft lawyerly search language
that will land on USB sound cards that also record line-level
audio in stereo.

Many thanks.

Martin McCormick

--
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patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are 
consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, 
J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity 
planning reports. https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/305295220;132659582;e
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