[vorbis] Such a nice codec! Soundcard recommendations?

[Ben Pearre]

Wow!  Ogg is sounding _really_ fine these days.  Waaaay past my
ability to tell from CD on my crappy sound card, even at pretty low
bitrates.  Which leads to my question: there's a huge difference
between what my sound card puts out and what my CD player can do
(Rotel RCD-950 to Classe' Audio Twenty preamp to Acurus A80 amp to
Epos ES-12 speakers, in case anyone cares).  If my computer is feeding
such a system, what's a good sound card to have?

Requirements:

* Has to work with Linux!!!

* Not too expensive.  This is fuzzy: I'd pay a few hundred for
  _really_ nice sound, but if I can pay $50 and get something that
  sounds pretty close, I'd rather do that, just because computer
  technology changes faster than audio technology --- I'm unlikely to
  have the same card in 5 years, whereas my stereo should be good for
  20 (assuming, as seems likely, that 192KHz, 24 bit audio _isn't_
  around the corner after all!)

* Stereo is necessary, 5.1 isn't.  This is for music, not movies.  But
  if there's a great 5.1 sound card, I'll take that.

If you email me directly, I'll summarise to the list.  I'd also very
much appreciate it if you tell me what kind of stereo you're running
the sound card to...

Cheers :)
-Ben


-- 
bwpearre at alumni.princeton.edu                 http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: part
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 233 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis/attachments/20020912/65665007/part.pgp