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What is the need to waste time with that crappy SACD format when you can have 24 bit 96Khz PCM audio on standard DVDs? I don't even see the need for the so called "DVD Audio" format when the standard DVD already has enough audio capabilities. And DVD-Rs are becoming more and more common. No need to waste time in "Yet Another Sony Deception" format. There are plenty of "24/96" sound cards for production on PCs, and some as cheap as 128$, are a good option for alternative distribution in a media that will play in all dvd players and dvd rom drives on earth.

If you have an SB Live with digital i/o, you can rip your digital music to your computer and then record to MD. This will strip the copy protection and then let you record protected material to your minidisc. It takes a little longer but the quality is there. If you don't have digital i/o or a Live. Get a Value and check out Hoontech.com for more information Hope this helps.

There only real limitation is that, right now, AC-3 forwarding will probably only work on Trident 4DWave NX based cards like the Soundtrack Digital NX. This is no incident since Trident has released ALL of their soundcard documentation to us. The SBLive! card should support AC-3 forwarding, as soon as Creative releases more documentation that describes the S/PDIF interface in detail. RME cards will probably be next on the list of fully supported S/PDIF cards.

I have had great success with playing full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound from within Linux using an external decoder (Matrix baby!). This is one less hurdle in getting good DVD support in Linux (excuse the blatant shameless plug :-)

Check out ac3play and alsaplayer

-adnans

I hate to be an AOLer, but "Me Too" :-)

I specifically bought my HoonTech Trident 4DWaveNX because of the ALSA support. (http://www.project-alsa.org) It took me a while to find a company that sold 4Dwave but I am glad I did instead of buying one of the SB cards that all the local stores are pushing.

Hoontech can be found at http://www.hoontech.com/.

If you are in Canada you can order HoonTech products from Votron Electronics (in Ontario) at http://www.votronelectronics.com/hoontech/order.ht m

Thinking of HoonTech, does anyone have one of thier amps? I was thinking of getting the PA2000 to connect my machine to a couple of nice big unpowered speakers. It looks like it should fit into a 5 1/2 drive bay, does it?

I think, from what I've read, the best buy for general use today are those cards based on the Trident 4D Wave NX chipset.

They're relatively inexpensive, have fancy features like digital output, are well supported under Linux, and are produced by a company which has not only released full technical documentation for these cards (without any silly NDA's), but fully GPL'd Linux drivers have been written and released by Trident themselves. You can't ask for much more than that.

Check out those made by Hoontech for example.

See John Fulmer's lengthy review.

Just plug the Record player into the back of the computer (mic port, line in) and record a .wav file. Make sure you use 44.1khz, but Records arn't sterio so you can you can record in mono (the mp3s will take up 1/2 the space).

LP's are stereo; one channel comes from vertical movement of the stylus, and the other from horizontal.

The method you describe for sampling LP's is horribly inadequate for most discerning ears. Most sound cards have hopeless A/D converters, and computer cases are incredibly bad sources of EMF and EMI radiation. A better way would be to use an external A/D converter, and connect that to a soundcard with SP/DIF or AES/EBU inputs. Or use something like a Hoontech card that has external analog stages (the card itself is just a data pump).

Of course, given the choice, my preferred setup would be a Linn LP-12, connected to a tube pre-amp, connected to an Apogee PSX-100, connected to a digital sound card. But we all have our biases ;-)

You have a valid point when comparing the analogue outputs, but external sound modules such as Yamaha's MU-10 get around the noise problem by externalizing the card. Admittedly, the price is higher than a consumer card, but not by much.

The SoundBlaster Live has a surprisingly good analogue output, even in the value edition. If you rip your tracks from CD directly you will get more than acceptable results from even a Value. For the audiophiles, the SBLive (full) has an SPDIF digital output, which is a fairly standard interface on high end amps/powered speakers. Third party manufacturers (such as Hoontech) also make optical digital output daughterboards for the Value for exceptionally low prices. Coupled with the Live's internal 6-point sample interpolation, this gives a consumer level card professional quality output for an amazingly low price.

The only drawback is that the sample rate of the digital output is fixed at 48kHz, which is not a standard rate (CD's play at 44.1kHz) - you'll need to make sure your equipment can handle this rate before splashing out. Hoontech also manufacture an affordable digital amp which can handle this, and I'm sure if you looked hard you could find plenty of others.

You may want to take a look at the Hoontech 4D Wave NX card, which uses the trident chipset of the same name. Trident has released a GPL'd driver, so it should work "out of the box" with ALSA ( Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). The Hoontech card has S/PDIF out (optical & coaxial). You can buy it from http://www.audiencedp.com for $47 plus $5 S&H (I did). You can also try to buy direct from Hoontech, but I am not sure how they handle the oversea shippings (unless you live in Korea :).

www.hoontech.com has some.

henri

anyone know where i can find a cheap stand-alone DAC?

The Trident 4DWave NX based cards support this. They're still a little hard to find, but you can order them from Hoontech at http://www.hoontech.com. They offer quite a bang for the buck.

Trident actually wrote a GPL'd Linux driver for this thing, so it's a good card to buy.