[vorbis] Such a nice codec! Soundcard recommendations?

[John Morton]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002 07:31, Ben Pearre wrote:
> 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).  

For typcial consumer grade soundcards, yes. Your Rotel uses a good quality 
power supply, DAC, and probably implements all the levels of CD audio error 
recovery. Typical cdroms and soundcards use cheap DACs and live inside an 
electromagnetically noisy computer case. Your Rotel probably cost five times 
as much as a cheap cdrom and soundcard, too :-)

>If my computer is feeding
> such a system, what's a good sound card to have?

I'm using a cheap CMedia M6 card, and the digital output to my AV receiver, so
the transport out of the computer is as good as it gets, and the sound 
quality ends up being wholly down to the quality of the DAC in the receiver 
(and everything else in the chain from there, on, of course).  

> Requirements:
>
> * Has to work with Linux!!!

Most do, these days. Check out the ALSA soundcard matrix for what
that driver supports:

 http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/

> * 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!)

A few hundred US would get you a pro audio card or USB device, in the 2-6 
channels of output range, I would think. That's what the Eridol ones where 
worth, last I looked.

> * 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.

Most of the new consumer cards are doing 5.1 in one form or another. 

> If you email me directly, I'll summarise to the list.

Have a look at the reviews on digit-life:

 http://www.digit-life.com/sound.html

Unlike typical reviews of PC soundcards, which tend to focus on game 
features, these reviews include tests of a lot of the interesting audio 
quality numbers, and they tend to look at pro audio gear, as well.

>  I'd also very
> much appreciate it if you tell me what kind of stereo you're running
> the sound card to...

Right now, I'm using a CMedia M6 using the optical SPDIF output into the back 
of a Marantz SR4000 receiver, hooked up to B&W DM603s (S2), LCR 600 (s3) 
center, and some old Technics floor standing speakers as sides. Theres a B&W 
ASW 600 sub in there, too - digital output get's you AC3 (and DTS) 
passthrough, so I get good home theatre out of a $NZ70 soundcard :-)

When Soundblaster Extigys get cheaper, or there's a successor or rival unit 
that does hardware DTS decoding, I'll ditch the receiver in favour of one of 
those plugged straight into some power amplifiers.

John
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