[vorbis] Such a nice codec! Soundcard recommendations?

[James Snook]

Well problematic though people claim they are... I have a SoundBlaster
Live 5.1 "Gamer" (Europe name, dunno bout USA) and it works just fine
under all versions of windows since 98, works perfectly under Redhat
7.0/.1/.2/.3 & SuSE 7.x and 8.0. I run it to my Sony amp and into a set
of Wharfedale NXT "Loudpannel" wall hanging speaker's wit a sub unit,
and in my opinion it sounds great. Also I have had not one problem with
it.  SBL's are pretty damn cheep these days so I'd venture that it is an
ideal card.

Just a side note for anyone paying attention, I've spent all week ABX
testing Ogg Vorbis VS the original CD audio, I wanted to try and get
Vorbis to match the sound quality of my MP3 collection (LAME --r3mix
[96~256kbps vbr). I've been using some very stressful (on the codec)
albums, all various forms of metal to push Vorbis as hard as possible.
I am thinking right now that Vorbis q-6.20 is roughly where it becomes
impossible (for me) to tell the difference between CD and .ogg, but even
still I think there is a bit of midrange artefacts, I can clearly pick
out quality 6.00 from .wav, and my mp3's are practically impossible.
Any comments please?

<p>-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vorbis at xiph.org [mailto:owner-vorbis at xiph.org] On Behalf Of
Ben Pearre
Sent: 12 September 2002 21:31
To: vorbis at xiph.org
Subject: [vorbis] Such a nice codec! Soundcard recommendations?

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

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