Just to add a last comment on this subject... A Dutch magazine (elektür) published this week a comparative bench of several soundcards. The top three is established this way : - Terratec Producer Phase 22 (96 KHz, PCI) - E-MU 0202 (192 KHz USB 2.0) - Asus Xonar (192 KHz PCI)
The Edirol (192 KHz Firewire) is considered as "perfect... but"... it's linearity is one of the worth of the pack. It's the most expensive too :-( The M-Audio (5.1 or 7.1, 96 KHz, PCI) is very good indeed (with a incredible number of outputs and an excellent headphone sub-system)... equivalent to your Audigy 2 ZS. 96 KHz is good... 192 is far better for at last three reasons : - You must preserve a certain "security gap" on both side of you received spectrum, where the digital treatment of the sound card is less efficient than in the center part of the band. This "security area" (you can set this under Rocky 3.4) is impacting the effective transmitting bandwidth... particularly if you are using a 96 KHz card - a lot of short waves ham bands are around 100 KHz per segment (7, 10, 18, 24,8)... a 192 KHz card fits better. That means you have the "full band" under your eyes. - most of modern soundcard -even embedded one- are compatible with this sampling frequency (and, from a SDR point of view, your band segmentation is less complex) some drawbacks... - not every software is able to deal with 192 KHz cards (Alex.. pleeeeeaaaaase :-) ) - those cards are still more expensive than 96 KHz one - 192 KHz don't mean "perfect quality"... from a linearity standpoint, the Terratec is better than my Edirol (sob). Sampling is not everything, even if it's important) - bandplans programmed by most of SDR gurus are 96KHz segmented (the next softrock TXRX for eg.) ... I've probably forgotten some important points. Marc f6itu
