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New External Sound "Card"
(startx) writes: "Well, it looks like creative has done it again. This time they've created an external sound"card" that connects through usb to your computer or laptop. It's called the Extigy, and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of, along with the standard ir port with remote control. With this, a usb HDD, and a usb cd-rw, it looks like I can have most of my box, outside the box, just for the geek factor :-)" I don't think it's quite as cool-looking as the Stereolink 1200 (which I've never actually heard), but for a few bucks more the Creative crams in a lot of features.
Good golly. It's a soundcard for a notebook! No more putting up with El Crappo sound chips for me! Yes, I am actually being sincere about this :)
I think the link should be
www.soundblaster.com/products/extigy/
Well, the Creative Extigy may be nice, but it isn't exactly the first one to do this. "USB speakers" have a "sound card" built in. And companies like Tascam also make USB-based audio interfaces. The USB audio protocols are standardized, so this should work even for Linux (at least if they keep to the spec).
Nice move by creative. I make a lot of machines for musicians (being a geek and a musician). Musicians want to get labtops so they can bring it on their tours. People always ask me about how to get a music labtop. With this little box you can have all the connectivity you need (including minidisc which is used to do a lot of cheap recording). With ProTools free CSound and a few others you can have a complete composition kit on the go for an affordable price. Its simply put, exactly what they are looking for.
Expect working drivers in 2004.
Rob
do they have linux drivers available? how about QNX ones?
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
I've been looking for something like this for a while. Not to get my connectors externally, that's not an issue (I can get any extensions I like). To me, the key issue here is that the sound-generating circuits get out of the RF-wise nightmarish environment inside a computer case. There's so much induction going on you simply don't want to generate sound there.
So this is definitely something for my next desktop.
Actually, this looks like something that would be very useful if you have a laptop, and wanted to be able to use it to play music for others, like a traveling DJ.
This might be a good answer to This question.
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
Sound systems like this allow one to add high-quality sound support for custom systems that do not have a conventional form factor that allows for a PCI-capable motherboard, for example, apps that are built around PC/104. Nice stuff.
Featured ports include Optical and MIDI In/Out, SPDIF-In, Line-In and Mic-In.
I'm no expert with current sound cards, but it has that optical line in. Wouldn't that be the best way to 'back up' those pesky CD's with copy protection?
Now I only need a cheap laptop with USB, and I have quality streaming MP3 home stereo. Maybe I get this small Sony with the touchscreen, should be easy to make touchscreen-based song selector... hmm...
J.
Shouldn't this be a job for 1394, along with mass storage, image scanning and the like?
It seems to me that USB is being overstretched, together with ATA and after RS-232C and IEEE 1284... all of the stuff done by ATA, RS-232C and 1284 should be done by SCSI and 1394, and so much of the stuff currently being done with USB.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I wonder if it is strong enough to take a 19" monitor sitting on top? Under the monitor would be a perfect place for it on my desktop.
Why would anyone want to connect all that over usb. Unless you have multiple ports - and not just multiple connectors - 11 Mbit is all there is to share, and then hooking up a soundcard, a harddrive and a cdburner. Why not a TV tuner card while you're at it, and you will have a bunch of "cool" geeky stuff that won't work great at all together.
It may be cool for either gamerz or MIDIcians but I am not sure a solution based on an external 12Mb USB link (IIRC) could bring the software synth user a decent enough latency to use some soft synth in real time with an external MIDI keyboard as a controller.
Pity, Creative web site didn't give this info in their specs.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is perfect, optical for my minidisc, connector for my headphones, sp/dif for my speakers. This is a great idea and it will be so nice to have all the connectors up front rather than at the back of the pc below the desk. I assume it is built to sit under a monitor (had a power bar like that once). A little on the pricy side though.
And the only plug I require, SPDIF Out for my speakers, it doesn't have. Guess I'll not be considering that for future purchase...
But does Optical out do you much good when the sound has already been through the noise of the USB bus?
My G4 Cube already has something like this, albeit to a lesser extent. it connects to the USB port on my cube and OSX and OS9 just KNOW what to do with it. Wish it had all those cool doodads tho =]
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
2) Where's the FUFMe port!
3) D00d! With all these different ports, there's just GOTTA be a way to rip those copy-protected CDs!
woof.
Karma cap: te only way to go is down. Otherwise there's no point in writing another Score:5 post!
The remote control definitely has some potential..
:-)
I wonder if the buttons are programmable on the PC side to some extend (opposed as just to be able to turn up or down the volume on the device) -- being able to have basic WinAmp controlability (track skip, pauze, etc) from the comfort of my sofa would be perfect.
i'll still take the Yamaha RP-U200 over this thing... but the yamaha is missing EAX
http://www.yamaha.com/yec/cavit/idx_products.htmI thought this was rather odd but the requirements page says "Geniune Intel Pentium" and doesn't say anything else. Now I would assume it would work on anything of course.
Instead of taking up a drive bay for the Live! Drive and conecting it via an IDE cable to the Soundblaster in your PCI slot which in turn hooks into your digital decoder for Dolby digital.. plus 3 separate device drivers for each one and separate software apps to drive em and and and...
Now you've got one USB device that is more portable, cheaper and easier to fabricate/package/sell than the 3 individual items, and as an added bonus gets them into the laptop market outside of their existing OEM soundchip customers.
If that's not the definition of a damned smart convergence device I need to smoke better quality crack.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Where's that DVD audio I've been waiting for. I'm tired of these lousy sounding CD's. People only think they sound good because 99% of them have never heard music reproduced at a higher quality. It's about time the world moved to a higher quality format and 24bit 96Khz would be a good start.
the gilumont hercules game theater has all of these connections, but not via usb, although music recording over usb bloes big time, too bad they didn't do firewire, or have multiple inputs, but i guess i;m looking for something a bit more prefressional like a MOTU device
I have yet to find a consumer device which :-(
:-(
supports software control of IEC958 subcode
information. Vendors seem to think that
implementing "just enough" of the standard to
allow AC-3 output is sufficient.
So stuff like track marking on your minidisc
recorder end up being miserable hacks "flashing"
the TOSLINK output to insert a track mark. This
breaks to various degrees on different minidisc
recorders, resulting in anything from missing the
first few seconds of the next track, missing the
last few seconds of the last track, and the
inability to do seamless run-on tracks where a
song (or dialogue) spans multiple tracks. Using
preroll doesn't always work either, some recorders
will happily record the preroll as silence.
I won't even go into the mangling most devices
do with locking the output at 48khz, thus forcing
44khz source material to be resampled on output.
Maybe the Extigy got it right this time, and
allows software control of subcode information
so REAL track marking can be done, and allows
real 44khz output without resampling.
I'm not betting on it though
1. Start with 4 balanced inputs, each one with its own super-shielded A/D converter. (Possibly increase to 24 inputs for studio models.)
2. Instead of having an analog mixer, write all four of the streams from the four inputs to the hard drive at 16bit/44kbps ("CD quality"). All the mixing can then be done digitally, after the recording session is done. This is what musicians are used to from the bad old analog days when we all had a 4- or 8-track in our garage: we jam first, and then take our time mixing the multiple tracks down to 2, applying whatever effects necessary to get it to sound right.
Current amateur gear for the computer (like this box) requires you to record two tracks (L/R) at a time, and most bands don't work that way. This either forces you to mix the whole band as you record, but then you can't turn up the drums or equalize the bass after the recording is done, because they're all mashed together. If you want that sort of control, you have to record the drums alone (playing to a metronome), then the bass, then one guitar, etc. This process really kills the joy of home recording, and it kills any band chemistry that would come through if you played "live."
The obvious solution is to allow the simultaneous writing of more than two tracks to the hard drive. That way, you can play live but also adjust the individual instruments in the mixdown.
I'm sure tools like this exist, but they're made for studios or pros. But, there is no reason why the thing I describe would have to be expensive. Really, it shouldn't be more expensive than this external Sound Blaster, because the base model doesn't need all the fancy in/out MIDI and optical stuff. I know I would pay about $250 for the contraption, and I'm poor. If I can afford it, many people can. There is no way it would cost that much to make.
The only question is how many tracks USB can carry before it's saturated. Since it appears it can carry two at 24bit/96kbps, it should carry at least four at 16bit/44kbps. That would be enough for me. It may well be that any more than this would require SCSI or Firewire. Maybe also RAID. Fine. None of these things are out of the reach of almost-ordinary joes anymore.
Now if I could get my basement tuned to give good sound and rent some pro microphones (and maybe a mixer), I'd have a home studio as good as any other.
it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of
/out
No BNC
No Firewire
No Gate / CV
No Clock
No Balanced XLRs
No SMTPE in/out
No PHONO in
No MIDI Thru
... and it doesn't have a USB pass-through port. I already have 6 USB devices attached to my box, none of which have pass-through. Do I have to buy yet another hub to add another USB device that doesn't have pass-through? argh!
I am willing to pay extra for pass-through since most of my USB devices aren't bandwidth-heavy, it would help with clutter, and it would not force me to get another hub. Why don't manufacturers include this in their products?
What worries me most is what browser is everyone that has posted comments using if they haven't noticed this??
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
far from it. I dont see any XLR's there or any other balanced audio inputs. This is identical to everything else they make... looks impressive, but it is nothing more than consumer grade stuff with a few frills added on.
Why didn't they make it a bit more useful or offer a better version, something with a 2-4 channel mixer built into it? a real microphone preamp?
and my biggest question is have the solved the noise problems on the digital inputs that has plagued Creative products from the beginning?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While the parent post is obviously a bit over-the-top, it isn't entirely untrue...
I hacked a Netpliance I-Opener, connected a USB hub, D-Link network adapter, a canon USB inkjet printer and an Iomega ZIP CD-R drive to it. This setup isn't exactly trouble-free:
The network adapter dies after a few days up uptime and needs to be unplugged and plugged back in to get it working again.
Uploads from the I-Opener to another system through the adapter become corrupted.
Replaced the adapter and the problems still remained, according to the message boards at http://www.linux-hacker.net, this is a common problem relating to VIA's (the chipset the I-Opener uses) MVP4 USB implentation. Yuck.
The printer every once in awhile just decides to lose connection with the I-Opener. Luckily, it doesn't happen often so it's not a huge concern. I imagine it is also related to the VIA USB controller problem.
The ZIP CD-RW drive works fine.
Of course, I'd be judging USB badly if I just mentioned how a few devices misfunctioned connected to a modified Internet appliance... Except, I've had trouble with USB devices on my ASUSm motherboard BX chipset PIII 850 system as well as on a IMac.
The PIII seems to hate USB mice. Everything else worsk great - USB mice just never show up... Go figure.
Most common problem on the iMac is that devices simply will not show up until you disconnect and reconnect them a few times. Most notably, this applies to my Canon scanner and my Microsoft cheap-ass sidewinder joystick. The scanner usually works after two tries, the joystick - that's a different story; sometimes I give up before I can get the computer to recognize it.
Overall, USB seems to be a general pain in the ass - I'd gladly buy internal cards over ANTHING USB whenever possible.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
sorry but this nothing new, hardly noteworthy. So creative have poroduced a usb audio device, roland and yamahaha have had this kinda stuff for years now and arent exactly highly regarded by musicians or other "sound proffessionals" too much due to latency problems, although newer ASIO drivers are helping.
Metric Halo http://www.mhlabs.com/index2.html and others seem to have the right idea with Firewire devices, much higher bandwidth, lower latency etc etc... much more suitable to laptop musicians, especially those that use them to perform/record, especally since most new lappys have been sporting Firewire ports for the last year or so. Firewire audio devices have been around for at least a year now so why is it taking so long for the more "domestic" manufacturers (or even roland)to come up with similar products, they dont even need 1/4 of the features of a metric halo system to be useful to most musos.
It's nice to see this thing got SPDIF output. Finally I can use my laptop as MP3 player without using the headphone-output. But I'm wondering, are there other USB-devices with SPDIF output?
This device looks really cool at first, but look a little closer and you'll see that for a money, it blows chunks. If you need digital input and output, you'll have to buy something else.
Works perfectly. I think this is a great value.
For me as a musician ASIO is something that would have made this an interesting product. Low latencies are a must for live stuff and ASIO is currently the only way to that. The drivers for Audigy are OKish in that respect, but I'm taking my money elsewhere, specially knowing how Creative fucked up the EMU Aps owners. Promising new drivers that would support Win2k/Asio2 and then suspending the project. Creative's actions have proved that they are interested in selling cards for gamers.
Hi,
I've done (or tried to do) a fair bit of digital sound work using a SoundBlaster Live Platinum card, and, like most musicians using that card, have been very dissapointed by the sound quality. One of the issues is noise generated from interference within the case, and many musicians use external gear for just this reason. The Extigy type card could solve that problem beautifully in theory.
However, I'm wondering that the impact of USB will be on latency. IIRC, the first generation of external cards still used a PCI slot to connect the external gear to the CPU.
For example, their Audigy Platinum card supports ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) for low-latency access, but I don't see the same thing on the Extigy.
Of course, Extigy doesn't appear to support Firewire (or as Creative calls it, SB1394) on this card either. But it looks like they could make a strong move into the high-end amateur musician market if USB isn't a bottleneck and they add the Audigy-type features to this one. And oddly I didn't notice SoundFont on their feature list...
And before someone else points it out, yes I realize that there is something inherently silly about running Firewire _in_ to an external box connected to the machine via USB.
Dunno about the rest of the US but out here in the boonies in NH, none of the stores (bestbuy, circuitcity etc) actually have demo versions of these cards on display. how can one actually test the performance of this thing without having to wait for reviewers with varying priorities of their personal feature requests.
I have an old laptop. It has Windows 95, but for the hell of it I would like to try to put Linux on it and then make it part of my music system by plugging it into my amp via one of these External Sound 'cards', so that I can play mp3 and perhaps listen to net radio stations.
The laptop isn't fast enough to run KDE (I've tried installing SUSE6.2 on it but it's far too slow). All I want is a minimal distribution that allows me to do what I describe above and looks reasonably pretty. Does such a thing exist? Any help would be appreciated.
the Yamaha CAVIT
I would love to have one of these for my Compaq Armada that sounds like Snap, Crackle and Pop in my headphones. But the creative box, likewise the Stereolink is too damn large .
I want a small USB device that is not much larger than a pcmcia card and prefferably powered through the USB cable so I dont have to lug around a power supply also.
We don't have a fixed desk where I work, and often sit at different desks each day, so I can't run around with a bunch of stereo sized devices all the time.
So please, make a small sound device for USB that is capable of driving a decent pair of headphones. I use a pair of Grado SR80's which I love.
// Hp48
This seems like a great device, but it uses USB to connect to the computer. Sure, that's fine, and you can fit plenty of audio through your USB bus, but then add that USB Zip drive, and your printer, etc., all of which cut into your bandwidth, even when you're not using them.
Would you want to use 10BT Ethernet to connect the devices in your computer, instead of PCI? This kind of device will just give you latency, which is the number one complaint of every audio recording hobbiest I know.
A device with such a plethora of connectors needs to have a real bus to drive, not USB.
I sit here, after being awake for 5 mins, drinking my coffee, with my stereo 3 feet away from me. It's components: integrated amp, cd, vcr, etc. If I wanted to add a tape deck, I don't have to open a box and install it, I just plug it in.
Why not computers? You could have cpu/mem/vidcard in one and everything that uses lower bandwidth (100MB/s or so?) in separate components in a separate box. The boxes could be standard sizes, say 6 or 7 inches wide. Imagine not having to dig out the screwdriver to add another HD, DVD, different sound card, holographic crystal storage unit, etc.
Now, it'd be nice for us who can change the components now, but think how much easier it'd be for your parents, or the HR person at work who's home computer is 3 yrs old and doesn't want to lose their tax stuff at home when they upgrade.
I could find nothing in the spec or features list regarding any kind of internal MIDI synth. It does not claim to have a hardware wavetable or soft synth. It seems to have external only. It does not even state it has the junky OLP3 Yamaha cheap synth. If you want to have MIDI, I guess you will have to lug along your keyboard or find a used Roland Sound Canvas 55 module to plug in.
Having real DIN MIDI connections is nice however for the MIDI musicians.
The truth shall set you free!
Is it going to be usable as a pre-amplifier, to hook a vynil player to the sound card? Because I'd like to rip old LPs and save them on CD, but I'm a little stuck since the pre section of my old ampli is not working properly. I've found a nice gadget called Clean!Plus but this would be far better if it'd cover the pre-ampli stuff.
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
Although this product is "only" two-channel stereo, it sounds absolutely incredible compared to all other sound cards/add-ons that I've ever heard of!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I still prefeer to use:
MIDIMAN Audio Quattro
and/or
EMagic EMI 2|6
for the real professional on the road with a laptop.
I'd like to buy a device like this, add a HD & some powered speakers myself, but it won't work.
One of the major differences between USB & 1394 is that USB uses a master/slave configuration whereas 1394 is peer to peer. The implications of this are that you cannot connect USB slave devices without a master. I can connect my 1394 DV camera to my 1394 hard drive & copy data to & fro, but it is impossible (as yet) to do the same with USB because they would almost certainly be implemented as USB slaves. For the same reason, I cannot hook up 2 Ipaqs and transfer direct over USB.
This and not latency is why I'm waiting for a similar device with 1394 instead of USB.
USB 2.0 is supposed to implement peer to peer à la 1394, but I'll believe it when I can see, and play with it with my own hands.
Pat
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
If you're looking for a good soundcard for your laptop checkout either the EgoSys WamiBox or the Echo Mona Laptop. Both cards put Creative labs new addition to this market to shame.
a Roland UA-100 (http://www.harmony-central.com/Newp/SNAMM98/Rolan d/UA-100.html)
it is very nice and has noticibly less noise than internal cards. plus it works with linux. this has been around for a while.
http://notanumber.net/
I can't find any link to buy it or even how much the damn thing costs. Does anyone know?
My own limited experience with USB sound devices (speakers in this case, altec lansing) has been pretty miserable (LOOK! YOU JUST PLUGGED IN A NEW USB DEVICE! over and over every few hours) but then, it was on a friend's computer, using a variant of the windows virus.
But that aside, I have a technical problem... how EXACTLY is the audio data moving from the PC to this device? I mean what format? How much of your precious 12mbps USB capacity is it using? If not much, then I must assume some compression? Lossy? What about lag? I'd like to see someone play a DVD movie and watch the mouths of the people and see if they sync with the sound. The ONLY POSSIBLE WAY it could sync would be if the DVD player "knew" to delay the vid for 0.08 seconds or something. This is unlikely to be the case with MOST audio/video applications.
All in all, I see this as just another thing ported to USB "just because they can." You can have your lower-sound-quality-and/or-delayed-signal toy. Leave me my good old fashioned built-into-the-hardware synced-with-the-bus sound card, thank you.
What is seen as a good idea here can be extended.
There are various facets in use in the market today, in one form or another....... i.e.
"PC monitors that detach and become portable touch-screen tablets, allowing users to roam the house reading E-mail and accessing other information stored on a PC"
and of course this threads story on extigy
........in what is described below:
(replace "Linux system" where you see "amiga"!!!!)
Enclosures
Image of a modular system
another description of the image (note Raritan is not what it was in 1997 - which was a injection molding case manufacture)
and another perspective
Certainly a musician would find it beneficial to be able to add as many channels (actual hardware modules) into his processing/recording mix system.
Or whatever device you wanted to use to hook everything together. USB is great the way it is now, but if you wanted to start accessing CPU, RAM, and HD with USB... the computer would be so slow it would be practically useless. What you're talking about seems like a conceptually good idea though.
~ now you know
off of a usb router, I can plug this card, and my archos jukebox and actually have a digital out line instead of my crappy analog that archos supplies. yippeeeeee
Yankees suck. yep you know it.
What would keep someone from using this on a non-Windows platform? Just the software? What does the software do? Is it complicated DSP stuff or does it plunk a thunk into the system so that it "thinks" there is a PCI card in the machine? Is this just another incantation of a WinModem?
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
(which works on my Windows XP machine)
or its successors from
MidiMan
I'm no musician, but can't you just use multiple sound cards? Most dumb software won't be able to figure out what to do, but you don't need complex software to record raw audio.
I have a couple old sun-3s that I use as xterms from time to time (hosted off a faster machine with usb). Would be nice to give them sound, instead of all sounds coming through the main computers' speakers.
Then I just gotta figgure out how to connect a usb mouse to the remote x-terminal instead of the local machine. I'm sure it is possibla, but I fear i'll have to write some code to do it.
This will probably fall on deaf ears since everyone seems to keep buying Creative Labs products, but
dammit!
Their drivers are the worst I have ever seen! The SB Live has been out for years now and even their most recent driver still crashes occassionaly under every version of Windows I've tried (98SE, ME, 2000, Windows XP).
Now, before you say this is a flaw in windows, just yesterday my Linux box died twice in quick succession because of a sound driver bug. Every OS has its guts exposed to the hardware drivers.
It might be something that somebody might need, like my brother, who records his band 'Italian Angels' with computers. Everytime he does he has to haul his whole tower over to their drummers house just for the benefit of his sound card. But besides musicians and people who don't have any more slots in their machine (and who feel they don't have a good enough sound card) how many people are going to actually purchase this. I'm not saying it shouldn't be made, but isn't their better things to be wasting time on?
I'd like something like this to sit in my living room with my stereo stuff. I'm not sure how long a USB cable can be, but this could let me control an MP3 player on my server in another room, while piping sound out to my stereo system.
I don't need an entire computer and hard drive in an expensive box to be a stereo component, just something to play music from my server and allow me to control it from the living room.
An ethernet jack would've been cooler...but that might have made it an entirely different beaast inside.
pronoblem
This isn't the first time that a usb sound card has been done though is it? ;-p
I've been using a plantronics dsp 3000 headphones/mic device for about 6
months now and is excellent. Especially for Counter-strike..
It looks like a pair of headphones with a boom that plugs directly into my
usb port, no messing around..
-j
This is all well and good for a home sound solution, but are there any products out there that are small (size of an mp3 player) and run off USB power with good sound quality? I'm looking for something can carry always and use while working at a cafe. My laptop's sound quality is beyond unusable.
- Cotton
Check out the M-Audio Delta 44 -- it records 4 mono or 2 stereo tracks in. I don't recall if the inputs are unbalanced or not, but noise is almost nonexistent.
I love this thing; recording is simple -- set up whatever I want to record in a single take, run them through the appropriate preamps, and hit record in Cakewalk.
Not USB, though -- you *do* need a PCI slot, but it's got a very sturdy metal breakout box. I believe the converters are in the box, too.
And the cost was about $275.
darius
darius
Are we staring into a bleak future of music protected by what are in fact USB serialized dongles masquerading as sound cards? Or am I just paranoid (note: that's a rhetorical question)?
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
A dedicated USB bus is fine for stereo, and might even handle 5.1, but the problem is that people have keyboards, mice, scanners, printers, vidcap units etc all hanging off the same 11Mbps channel. Guess what - no sound when you're printing. No sound when you're scanning. Potential dropouts when using your USB game controller.
I can't believe they didn't at least use USB 2.0 for this.
With the exception of remote control and 5.1 sound, this kind of functionality has been around in usb audio devices for quite a while now. My Roland UA-30 has optical in/out, 1/4", coax, 1/8", and has been out for more than a year.
this is not a new thing at all; many other manufacturers have had USB and Firewire interfaces for quite a while. Take a look:
http://www.audiomidi.com/hardware/audio/usb.htm
and what's with the "it looks like creative has done it again." ? I have nothing against creative, they make cheap cards that are ok quality, but they're certaintly not on the cutting edge of audio. did anyone check whether or not "timothy" is a creative employee ?
this card looks ok and all, but it's certaintly not a huge breakthrough.
If they're targetting gamers, it seems a little odd that they would replace the standard game/midi port with the 5-pin DINs - which you can't plug a joystick into. I suppose they're thinking that usb joystick/gamepad is the way to go, but I really like my game pads as they are. On the other hand, having proper midi connectors makes it seem like they're taking musicians seriously again...
but the problem is that people have keyboards, mice ... dropouts when using your USB game controller.
I can understand problems when using a USB storage or scanner device, but joysticks? Uncompressed 44/16 stereo sound takes less than 1.5 Mbps, or 12% of USB 1's 12 Mbps capacity (think at least 6x CD-ROM). A USB HID (keyboard, mouse, joypad) should take even less. What, a 256-bit packet 60 times a second?
Will I retire or break 10K?
A simple "phono" cable can be bought at Radio Shack... just watch where your speakers are...
Make sure you use Line/out not speaker out on many cards...
Are we getting ready for a new computing future? This is what is promised by USB's supporters right?
Soon we will get computers in components - one thin case with the MB, processor and memory [etc]. 10 USB ports and then you customize... want sound? BAM! Want network? BAM!
Sounds good at first but then I look at all those wires connecting my stereo it scares me. Maybe we'll start getting rack mountable hardware and a rack to make our own 'case'.
Question though: Can I hook up two computers that have USB ports? That would be the killer app... not sound cards, though this looks spiffy.
But the price is a bit much, even the nice one on Thinkgeek is a little high. Will we see lower end soundcards?
Get your Unix fortune now!
2" analog tape at 30 IPS. Digital audio blows.
Myth.
Fact: The human ear can't hear more than 20 kHz (due to the low-pass characteristic of inner ear fluid, and by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling rate theorem, 44 kHz sampling can adequately reproduce any signal from DC to 20 kHz. The ear also can't hear more than 20 bits in practice, as 20 bits give a 120 dB dynamic range, and THX specifies a 75 dB SPL for a -30 dB signal (that is, 105 dB for a rail to rail signal).
48/24 (Dolby Digital sampling rate) is more than enough. Or are you shopping for music for your dog?
Will I retire or break 10K?
um..why the hell are we going back to having almost everthing external??
external drives i can undertand, but sound cards!?!
back in the 80's early 90s wveryting was bulky and took up a hell lot of deskspace. please tell me why are we doing this? since when does the average computer idiot have room for a scanner, printer, a ext. harddrive, a pda cradle, and stacks of cds, and now an external sound card? WTF!
is america that damn lazy that we dont want to take the effort to replace the sound card it self or is everybody afraid to open their case in fear of voiding the warranty?
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
...Thinking "Outside the box"
OK, someone had to say it... I just hope I was the first
Am I Over-Moderating??
I'm tired of these lousy sounding CD's. People only think they sound good because 99% of them have never heard music reproduced at a higher quality
Your beef should not be with the format, but with the mixing and mastering. Many pop CDs that seem to lack punch sound that way because they're mixed for radio play, and FM radio has a poor dynamic range, so naturally you lose the kick in the kick drum.
Will I retire or break 10K?
- devices like this have existed for more
than 2 years. products from Midiman,
SEK'D, Event Systems and other companies
offered this kind of configuration for
some time. its becoming more common
all the time.
- creative's audio products are widely
recognized by anyone with any experience
as being basically "just good enough" crap. they have terrible noise problems, and often come with basic h/w engineering problems (such as a fixed rate sample clock that forces resampling at any rate other than the chosen one).
- USB for audio is a bunch of crap. It can be
made to work, but its being used only because
most computers these days come with USB ports,
and far fewer come with IEEE1394 ports. It has no redeeming qualities and many drawbacks. There
are bandwidth problems, reliability problems, connector stability problems, protocol conformance problems - it goes on and on.
- IEEE1394 ("firewire") is vastly superior, but suffers from a lack of standardization on the
transport-level protocol used for audio and MIDI
data. There are at least 3 or 4 competing versions of this, with no resolution in sight.
- Several people have pointed out the lack of
balanced connectors, as well as the lack of XLR
connectors (these two items are strictly orthogonal from one another). Balanced analog I/O is a serious must-have for anything other than
the typical low-quality audio stuff 95% of you
do with your computers. Of course, that 5% might not be a big enough market to make it worth offering
:)
companies like creative are busy trying to make devices that appeal to many consumer's desire for stuff that appears to be "pro" or "semi-pro" gear. creative in particular has failed to make any equipment that even comes close to these descriptions. if audio on your computer matters to you enough that external converters are important, you should not be paying any attention to the extigy, but should instead be paying attention to products from Terratech, Event (even though they refuse to make linux support possible, they are nice devices), Midiman (Delta series) or RME. If you're really serious about audio on your computer, you'd already know that you should be basically buying an audio interface that supports ADAT optical connections and then a totally separate converter box (such as the Tango24 from Frontier Designs, or the ADI series from RME, or if money is tight, perhaps a Fostex unit). this configuration allows you to upgrade your A/D-D/A capabilities and the audio interface independently, which in turn implies the potential for improved channel counts and/or improved converters at a later date. --pY'know what? It occurred to me that the real reason they push the sample rate to 96Khz it removes the need for low pass filters to prevent aliasing. Less circuitry == cheaper to produce.
Sounds like the "oversampling" from the early CD days. If they can do a high-order sinc filter in DSP to go from 44 kHz to 88 kHz or 96 kHz, then they can use a lower-order filter on the analog side and still produce quality sound.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am willing to pay extra for pass-through since most of my USB devices aren't bandwidth-heavy, it would help with clutter, and it would not force me to get another hub. Why don't manufacturers include this in their products?
I assume that USB pass-through would require each device to contain a hub. The USB standard recognizes only five hubs deep on a chain (but it's not a Windows-specific limitation). Dedicated "hub" devices increase the branching factor of USB.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here are my questions:
I don't think this new Creative external sound card is a big deal at all. Oh, sure, it'll probably sell well. There are always those people convinced that their sound device picks up less interference noise/hum when it's outside a PC case.
I just dislike anything USB, for starters. That port doesn't have lots of bandwidth, for one thing. Couple that with everything under the sun wanting to share your USB connection, and it spells major trouble for low-latency sound.
Also, why give a musician a relatively fragile laptop? IMO, a poor hack of a solution. The ideal answer is building a PC in a rack-mount case, and installing it in a rack along-side any effects processors or rack-mount synths/samplers they might own.
You can buy a MIDI "surface controller" to get pads, knobs, and sliders galore which can be defined so you can work anything you'd normally have to drag or click around on with a mouse. (Eliminating all need for a mouse is the most important step to getting a PC on stage as music equipment.)
Interesting. I have never had a problem with any of my USB equipment, minus one due to a faulty USB chipset made by AMD. Note, I haven't touched a windows machine since before the days of USB.. so all my experience is with Linux, some experience with MacOS.
I bought a pci usb card for my sister's computer.. attached mice, scanner (hp3300), and a printer. No problem.
One machine of mine has an AMD Viper chipset, due to a bug in the chipset.. it will cause my system to do a hard reboot occasionally. I use a mouse on this system with no problems, but my handspring visor will historically crash it quite quickly.
Pentium II, Intel chipset. No problems at all, tried the Visor and an Epson printer.
Asus BP6, Intel PII board.. same machine, different boards. Mice, Visor. No problems.
I wonder why USB sucks so much. It works fine for me (minus one due to the fault(s) of AMD)
If you've ever looked at "Software Audio Workshop" (commonly just known as SAW), that's what they do. You throw in multiple sound cards and/or MIDI interfaces, and it supports all of them. Of course, this gets fun juggling DMA and IRQ conflicts at some point - but you don't want to run this sort of app on a heavily loaded system anyway. You'd probably, in fact, design a seperate PC just to work with SAW.
Do you think it's possible to package this in a PCMCIA card? Perhaps when Creative sees sales for this increase and realize that being able to take this on the road without the bulk would be a great boost for the road warrior. This would be the one time I wouldn't mind lugging around a dozen dongles either.
Just a thought.
Chow
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
USB audio device. Are the people here looking
for "musical laptop solutions" that bad
at researching peripherals? Is it that much of a
slow news day that a minor product announcement
is headlining news?
Roland's UA-30 (years old, and cheap!) has
*more outputs* than this silly thing (from the
data sheet, the Exigy doesn't even have SPDIF
outs!) and a better interface. It's mainstream
enough that if you plug it into a Mac or a Win2k+
box, it'll just work.
What I want to know is what is the compatibility of this thing going to be. I suspect that it is not going to conform to the USB Audio standard like the stereolink 1200 does, and I don't expect that we will see linux drivers anytime soon (let alone full featured drivers) based on how excruciatingly slowly the SB Live drivers are progressing. If only the stereolink device could also do full quality recording from RCA inputs.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
That will hopefully change when the native 1394 hard drives start coming out. The current crop of so called "firewire" drives (at least the ones I've seen) are just ATA/66 drives with an ATA to 1394 interface stuck on the back. No wonder they're only half as fast as ATA/100, they're only transferring at 66MHz to start with, and there's the overhead of translating 1394 commands to ATA.
0 1 - just my two bits
Can anyone provide actual reviews? I mean sheesh, this is such a new toy that it doesn't even show up on it's authorized retailer's listings... It looks okay, but what does it cost, how does it sound, etc?
Additionally, how does it perform while, say, scanning an image on a USB scanner, or while performing heavy mousing on a USB mouse, while playing Quake?
Other than looking like a nifty ad for the device, how about providing solid (and useful) information?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
this device claims to be capable of 24bit/96kHz audio. that's 24 bits * 96,000 samples per second (or 2,304,000bps). how exactly does it do that over a USB 1.1 pipe at 1.2Mb?
Does anyone know how good the SPDIF connecters are on this thing? Creative has a history of suppling crappy digi IO with their products such as the soundblaster live. I would love to pick one of these up to do some laptop taping but right now people don't even accept DAT's that are copyied on to the hard drive via sblive. I don't want to pick up one these and find out that the digi IO is useless.
its probaby as shit for musicians as the sbLive or Audigy is going to be - crappy converters, crappy asio drivers, 48k native clock speed, horribly resampled 44.1k reclocking, and, most importantly, SB cards have never, ever synced well with *anything*.
this isnt news. rme makes interfaces for pros using firewire and usb - as does emagic, mark of the unicorn, and midiman. some use the pcmcia slot as well.
its just another crap product from a company interested in volume and hype. nothing they've done has been heralded by anyone who works with music day in day out.
This just sucks. USB is just a way for Intel to sell you a faster processor and by putting a sound card on the USB bus it just sucks more time off your processor to transfer the needed data to the sound device for output. There is a reason for fast parallel buses such as the PCI. It is called low overhead.
Silly Rabbit...Sig's are for kids.
Here's my take on things like this and the Stereo-Link.
Great you by-pass the internal DAC and goto an external one.
Two problems
1) You can just get a better DAC [i.e newer sound card]
2) A flawless DAC will not improve the quality of a highly compressed MP3,OGG,etc sound file.
I think those "customers" that said it sounded so great should try this little "home experiment".
Plug your lineout to your stereo. Does it sound just liket the "stereo-link". If so you've been had. If not then you have a horrible internal sound card.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What I want do is to just daisy-chain every component together without having to look at labels on the back panels. FireWire would be good for that.
Somebody had the brilliant idea of making a digital audio coax connection use RCA plugs. Listen to what happens when you plug your DVD's output into one of your receivers analog inputs...
Anyone considering purchasing one of these cards should be aware of Creative labs "Creative" interpretation of "digital I/O"
.wav file in Soundforge containing a square wave, then used my Turtle Beach Fiji card to write the .wav file to DAT. Then I used the Fiji to re-read the DAT, and recovered the square wave.
Some of their soundblaster cards have a digital I/O port -- labelled SPDIF, and in fact, if you connect a DAT deck to the digital I/O port, it will pass a signal.
However, the card does not pass the digital data. Instead, it converts it to analog, then resamples it to digital!
I didn't believe this at first, but I did the test -- I created a
When I used the SPD/IF inputs on the Creative soundcard, it was obvious that the signal was being passed through an D/A/D iteration. The signal was extremely distorted and noisy. It wasn't a square wave anymore!
I don't know whether or not this particular device has the same problem, but anyone who is looking for a device for performing accurate digital I/O transfer should BEWARE!
When can we expect Linux drivers for this puppy to appear?
The problem is that sound cards do not always record at the exact same frequencies. Normally this is fine, because every channel is being recorded at the same rate -- in synch with every other channel you are recording. If you put two cards into your box and their sampling frequencies deviate enough, by the end of a song, the two streams may have de-synchronized a noticeable amount.
That's exactly what I was going to say, I can't see how USB can pass enough data for a full 5.1 digital bit stream. Anyone know the answer to this one?
Paul
MAybe a few years from now my GeForce Graphics card will be external too. hehe
I don't think the soundcard itself would matter as much as the speakers themselves. If they somehow come up with a new USB based digital rights speakers, but I don't think this would ever fly. There will always be analog out on whatever device you use, there is just no way around it. Besides, there are high quality mics that will suffice. This is a legal issue, and I'm not sure it will ever be solved.
and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of
No. There's no XLR.
All my stereo equipment uses XLR patch cables because XLR is balanced and therefore induces almost no noise into the signal. It's a professional format, commonly seen on microphones.
I had to build it into my faithful old SB16; nuked the on-board output amplifier and replaced it with a pair of 12AX7 vacuum tubes because their high operating voltages make induced noise less significant than with comparable gain from semiconductors. And having tubes inside your computer is cool. The tubes are driven directly off the D/A converter outputs and drive my balanced line outputs.
The rest of the system puts to shame the plastic crap most people use as computer sound systems. The amplifier is an early semiconductor model, a Sound A-5000 from about 1968. The noisy germanium preamplifier stage was replaced with 12AX7s with DC filament supplies, zener B+ regulation and a few other hacks. These drive the original transistor output stage, which is surprisingly good. The speakers are Acoustic Research AR-4x, which sit on either side of my monitors (dual-headed display). I'm not really much of an Enya fan, but I've made people weep by playing an MP3 of "Only Time" with that system.
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Why don't manufacturers start using more RF remotes? I have seen this on some satellite receivers and love it. I can control the receiver in a completely different room. If this card had an RF remote, I could run an audio cable to my component system and control it...
It's a neat idea if you ignore the fact that USB sucks ass. I've tried high bandwidth stuff on half a dozen completely different machines and had different results on all of them. Only a couple could use my 4x CDRW reliably and one of them only at 2x. I have a USB NIC on my i-opener that craps out if I try to send more than a hundred megs or so at high speed, tho it'll run for days with a slow, steady feed from the cablemodem or DSL.
It sounds like it is just another way to put more crap outside of your computer. But if you need the room inside then it could help, probably not.
I thought it was cool except for the fact that you are going to have the little device sticking out of your computer \. Personaly I don't like things everywhere around my computer so personally I probably would not buy it unless it is really really good.
- MayorQ
I think that the new innovation is inconvient. No- body likes to have a external port on their laptop or personal pc. But there is also a good thing because it can be used with other computers.
I have no clue what i would use an external sound card for. I don't believe it's anything that would be of use to me. Just something else that can easily get broken outside of the tower.
And I thought the audigy had a weird name!
>they have terrible noise problems
Indeed they do, but they've promised 100db signal to noise ratio. They don't qualify the promise so it must apply to input as well as output!-)
They don't seem to be quoting distortion yet but getting the input amps away from the inside of the PC must help. Maybe they've also got some magic A/D converters as well.
Sam
(sorry)
The real myth is that current science / acoustics understand just how human hearing works.
There are studies whose conclusion is that the impulse response of human low frequency hearing is significantly better than what you might think.
What I mean is that if you take a nice low/semi-low frequency tone (say 50-500 hz or so) and perform a quick start/stop on it and then FFT the sound you get a partial that is of high frequency. That partial can be more easily detected by the human ear than a steady state tone of the same high frequency, AND that people can detect sound (or the lack thereof) via this method to much higher frequency than traditionally thought.
There has been much talk of voodoo and double-blind testing and what can or can't be heard in high-end audio circles. I think the lesson to take from it is that having knowledge doesn't necessarily imply that you know where your knowledge ends. Be prepared for phenomena you can't explain.
Adam
Oops. I think the Layla and Mona both have *balanced* ins/outs, but the Mona has XLR ins/outs rather than TRS.
Like many I am an early adoptor, I got the stereo-link and it kicks major ass and it works with linux.
Most FM recievers are not built for audiophile operation. If you've ever heard a quality AM Stereo tuner compared to most AM you'll know how little thought is put into sound quality in some cases. Additionally, many FM stations compress and equalize their broadcast to sound good to the ears of the audio-philistines that populate the world.
But I understand that as a _format_, that FM is capable of suprisingly good quality. I've been told that (before CD anyway) a BBC live broadcast heard over a good stereo with a audiophile FM tuner (ever thought of spending $2500 on an FM only tuner? thats sans preamp, amp, and speakers!) was the best way to hear music. No recording medium at all!
Adam
> USB for audio is a bunch of crap.
What are you talking about?
I use USB audio. It sounds better, it requires zero configuration, and it works great. What's the problem?
it doesn't have the bandwidth to scale to semi-pro let alone pro use. the latency characteristics are just barely acceptable. the entire protocol design wasn't properly thought out for high-bandwidth streaming data services. thats what IEEE1394 is for, both in terms of its bandwith capacity but also the design of the protocol. if you're just streaming stereo 16 bit 44.1kHz streams to and from your box, i'm not suprised you think that USB works. you're at the low end of the audio scale, and there are many things that will work for you that will break for people with more demanding requirements. --p
I don't "think" it works. It does work. Your point seems to be that a car isn't a Saturn V. So what? That doesn't mean the car doesn't "work", it just means it won't take you to the moon.
I'm a graduate student in electroacoustic music and I have to say that I have yet to be impressed by USB's uses for sound. (actually, USB's uses for much of anything) I'm particularly incredulous since this is designed to work with USB 1.1, which, from every experience of mine, is a horrible means of handling digital audio. (A firewire sound card, on the other hand, would work) The bandwidth is way too narrow for the transmission of much data (even though some of the processing will be done on-card). I've seen this problem with the USB Quattro interface before; 4 ins and 4 outs, but God have mercy if you're crazy enough to try them all at once. Which, I should point out is going to be the inherent problem with this device. With USB 2.0 out now (albeit in limited form), it would make far more sense for them to aim for this; this protocol at least has some headroom, though, again, Firewire is out there now.
What is it about this pedantic, snide, condescending, and questionably accurate post is it that earns it "+5?"
The Stereo-Link 1200 sounds interesting, but I can't figure out how the $170.00 unit could replace my $7.00 patch cable between the speaker output of my PC to my Yamaha stereo. The sound sounds great. I do like the idea of an external sound card though. I'd still pipe it through my Yamaha.
48khz is enough to reproduce 24khz audio signals, IF the phase of each frequency is known
I'm aware that sampling discards the sine component of tones at exactly the Nyquist frequency.
Otherwise you could have a 24khz sine wave that is coincidentally sampled only on the 0 amplitude points which would make it be recorded as silence.
Correct, but it can reproduce 23.9 kHz tones perfectly (phase and all), requiring only a convolution with (a windowed version of) the sinc function.
A superior system would be delta sigma modulation (google it for additional information) which uses 1 bit encoding with typically something like a 2.8mhz sampling rate for a frequency responce range approaching 100khz.
In other words, a 1-bit linear sampling rate with a noise-shaped dither pattern.
As to the proper number of bit for PCM, the big problem is that we hear volume logrithmically but currently digital audio records linearly.
I understand this, and recent lossy audio codecs such as MP3 and Ogg take this into account when constructing quantization tables. Heck, even the mu-law encoding used on telephone lines is floating-point (i.e. approximately logarithmic).
but for very quite things (like quiet passages in classical music), the extra bits come in handy very quickly.
Even if we get into a whisper-quiet passage played at 30 to 35 dB SPL, and 16-bit linear PCM begins to use only the region around +/- 127, the ear still can't hear the quantization noise because it's 1. below 0 dB SPL and 2. most likely shifted up into the 16-22 kHz range, where the ear often can't reliably hear even 30 dB SPL, with the noise-shaped dither patterns commonly used in modern CD mastering.
The extra bits are also very handy for DSP type tasks
You're not supposed to do DSP on music you don't own rights to; you're supposed to listen to it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Granted, a newbie question. How does USB audio works in the first place. For example, how do I configure my winamp to use this device ??
BigBlickMopar wrote:
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
I'd like to disagree. An audiophile-class soundcard just doesn't justify the cost which hardware manufacturers would put on it, and doesn't really find much of a practical application for most end-users. The mainstream can't tell the difference between an mp3 sampled at 128kb/s and one sampled at 196 or 256, and the marginal increase in quality doesn't really justify the space and expense of a better card.
However, as an avid gamer, I can attest that positional 3d sound, especially in first-person style games, adds a great deal to the experience and can improve gameplay, especially in games like counter-strike, where one overly loud footstep can mean sudden death.
I'm not knocking your hardware hacking skills, I'm just saying that high-end audio cards would, like most other audiophile equipment, be a niche market at best, and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers.
- Dave
If this device uses USB 2.0, then I might already be sold.
why the f#@k do i want to have any analog cables going to my stereo in the first place...ick. gotta have me digital all the way to the stereo's DACs then I can have the amp f$@k up the signal in its clean nearly noise free way...gotta get it analog sometime to get it to the speakers..... but no pops or chirps from my sound card, or hum from an analog line in for me, haha!
Get used to it. "news for nerds" is actually run by a bunch of lazy wanna-bes these days. they've fallen to the quality of zdnet or cnet. oooh, im a troll, oooh im offtopic, oooh the editor who pasted this article from his email doesnt know anything about computer audio.
Why aren't more consumer electronics being produced with RF remotes? I have seen this on a few satellite receivers and it's great. I can pipe the signal to other TV's in my house, and use the remote as well without being near the receiver. It would be great to have one on this Sound "card" so I could do the same and pipe an output to my home component system...Any ideas?
So lets see here .. we have usb everything now.
.. firewire Video Cards ... then what is going to follow?
.. if we would put all of this junk into one central box it would clean .. umm wait a second?
Sound Card
Ethernet Card
Mouse
Keyboard
Monitor
Hand Held Cradle
Digital Camera
Drives
etc.
And firewire
Drives and other misc items.
Whats left
A 3"x3"x3" cube containing the MB/CPU/Memory?
Excellent! Exactly what I want. To bring the cluster fuck of wire under my desk and put them onto my desk. Keep that floor clean!
Ya know
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
After the SBLive! fiasco, I'd be careful.
For those of you who don't remember, the SBLive! from Creative had a lot of problems with a lot of different configurations. They tended to saturate the PCI bus and broke the PCI2 standard resulting in compatibility issues with all kinds of other devices, including motherboards with "independant" chipsets like Via.
I hope they have a better approach for their USB design. The last thing I need is a soundcard that upsets the rest of my USB devices.
Sigs are awesome huh?
This is nowhere near a new thing.
the event ez bus
edirol UA-5
wamibox
digigram vxpocket
RME hammerfall
I don't know how people never bothered to notice any of these. Some of these are even very high quality (the RME and the VXpocket are both for pro audio) and are great laptop sound solutions.
-- atomly
In the entire time I have owned the card creative never released any new drivers for it at all.
I use amd and via chipsets and have had many problems with the card across two different motherboards (a7v and msi 6380ru). Everytime I had to shuffle the card around because the IRQ sharing wouldn't work properly.
I finally gave up when max payne would randomly crash and I swapped out my sblive for my good old trusty Diamond MX300 card and never had a problem since.
I then upgraded to a hercules game theatre XP and this has confirmed I will never buy creative again.
Hercules frequently updates their drivers and they add new features all the time. This is what creative promised and never delivered.
The hercules card is noiseless - unlike my sblive, and was half the price of a sblive platinum (which has a comparable feature set).
I almost gave into the evil creative and the audigy but it was twice the price and considering creatives track record of never continuing to release new drivers for their old cards I gave up.
I now have a totally stable system for the six games I am currently addicted to (Alien vs Predator 2, Castle Wolfenstein, Max Payne (I am replaying it at a high difficulty level), Grand Prix Legends and F1-2001 with the force feedback patch).
Not bad, and certainly cheaper than a Docking station and PCI Audigy EX, which has been my plan up until now.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Creative creates very little in house. Most of their stuff is rebranded h/w from other companies with rebranded drivers.
C'mon, I've had nothing but pain with all kinds if systems with Creative soundcards. There software is bloated to the extreme of being like Ms Windows. Who does not turn off that 16bit dos emulator to gain more system resources in here? Creative cards have a bad habit of also sharing IRQ resources, but not stably. Creative cards come with very little updated software/driver support. Has anyone noticed that they fail to put any links for the Live 3.0 software? That is right my friends, you have to BUY the CD or look elsewhere. But enough of what we know sucks about Creative sound cards. The only thing I do love is my Creative 52x Cd-rom, at least something was built right. =/ I can prove most of my ill feelings with the one game called EVERQUEST. Yes, that is right, just ask most EQ players that have Win98 or XP with Sound Blaster problems, which comes to about 400,000 players. Now I'm not trying to start a crusade to put down what used to be a leader in the sound card arena. It's just that there was some really good sound software and hardware like Aureal Vortex (A3D) that got sucked under by the fat cats. I've come to the conclusion that Creative just builds cool looking stuff and plays off on the popularity of the name. After having 3 Creative sound cards and not one game that ever ran flawless with sound, I must accept that they are no longer worthy of the pimp daddy's money. Now after buying a Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard, all of my problems have been solved with EverQuest! I wound recommend these cards to anyone as a good alternative to Creative soundcards.
>"With this, a usb HDD, and a usb cd-rw, it looks like I can have most of my box, outside the box, just for the geek factor"
If you really were a geek, your external components would be SCSI.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The StereoLink sounds fantastic: good DACs, free of RF and power supply/hd noise. It also has an excellent headphone amplifier capable of driving difficult loads (high impedance phones like Sennheiser HD580, Etymotic 4S). Unfortunately, it suffers from the same thing USB audio has always suffered from: occasional stuttering and hiccuping due to disk access. Stereolink knows this is a problem, and they do their best to help, but hardware makers need to get their acts together with microsoft to provide better support for USB sound. Hopefully now that Creative is relying on USB audio, something will be done about it.
USB problems aside, Extigy is going to be great for standalone 5.1 decoding use with Xbox or PS2.
I like the name, it's slightly better compared to the name given to all of Creative's other sound-cards.
How about the 'clickpopstatic' sound card. Or the 'screwupthepcibus' card. Or better yet the 'bullyandsueaurealtilltheygobroke' card.
Windows drivers available in 6 months, working drivers in 6 years.
Which eliminates like 75% of the crowd at Slashdot (at a guess)
Anyone have info on this? Creative have always been very tight-lipped and indifferent towards *NIX, which is why we didn't have a working emu10k1 driver until a considerable time after the release of the original SBLive. I really hope they haven't done the same here, as I'd be interested in one of these.
Naturally if it doesn't support Linux.... they've lost a sale.
Forget spending all that money if you already have a sound card. I run output from my $10 amplified speakers to aux input of home stereo system. Sounds fine to me. Besides... I'm playing MP3's anyway.
-tbos
This should prove marvelous for people like me who use a DVD player with optical out as their primary CD-player. I'm definitely looking forward to blowing my speakers out randomly the next time I pick up a CD!
-Jayde
What's a sig?
I'm still waiting for the Layla to drop down to a price I can afford. Meanwhile I've got a Roland UA-100, which periodically has sync problems (though strangely enough it's gotten better since I stuck a USB hub between it and the computer - that still makes no sense to me) but otherwise does the job. Some of the BOSS on-board effects are quite usable.
[TMB]
After looking at the available stuff and reading up on USB latency, I'm convinced that the PCI card+breakout box with D/A-A/D converters is the optimal setup. I wish this architecture would make its way into more "mass production" sound cards so the prices could start falling.
I guess I was silly to think that I had satisfied all of toy cravings in December...
I only saw one post of this here, but I really must amplify (pardon the pun) the fact that Yamaha's CAVIT systems are great! This is the difference between consumer computer audio, and audiophile sound. Check out Stereophile's review.
Even at 48kHz, the clocks are never perfectly synchronized so you end up with lost samples and/or new ones added.
Its also possible that (under windows) the spdif inputs go through the bass/treble dsp filter, if the sample rate converters didn't mess your data up, this will ;-)
But Now, I'm a frequent traveller, and my main PC is a laptop (compaq evo n600c) and I gotta say that audio solutions on laptops are either lame (those damn ESS chipset !) or pricey (the Motu or RME stuff for laptops are just too much for me). I mean, I want to record my guitar from time to time and I need a midi controller to tweak my POD thingy... But I do not need the 1000 bucks 8 inputs cards !!!
Then Creative comes with this thing, 134 bucks, with stereo input, midi controller, toslink in/out. As much as I try to avoid Creative, this comes quite handy, and I think I'll buy it. Not that it's the best piece of gear for me, but at least it offers the best bang for the buck, imo.
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
i have a MOTU 828 firewire card (motu.com), running on two different machines - 1200 athlon desktop and 800 duron vaio laptop.
this thing rocks, but it's expensive. if you're looking for semi-pro stuff, check out emagic's 2|6
(emagic.de) - it's USB though
Howdie, people.
- Does anyone know if Creative Labs has a soundcard that has a build in decoder for both Dolby Digital 5.1 AND a DTS Decoder?
- Besides that, what will be the future standard? DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1?
-And are there already followups on these standards? (I heard something about 6.1 and 7.2 and in the future there probably will be something like 23.12.35.63, but for Pete's sake people! How many different positions can a sound come from?)
- For that matter, what is the theoretical minimum difference in distance between two sounds, when people can still hear the difference between the same sounds?
Regards,
You don't need to see my
It doesn't have every port that I could want since it doesn't have XLR or 1/4 phone, which is what I use to connect into my mixer. Also where is the AES ????
The only reason I mention this is with the 5.1 surround speakers with DD Decoders in them, you plug in SPDIF (for movies) and 2 audio outs (for games).
I have a Game Theater XP sound card, and you have to reboot to change which output gets used. I have one of the midiland 7100+ speaker setups (Got em like 2 weeks before the Klipsch 5.1s came out, or I would have them), and you can either have DD5.1 , or 2 speakers. It is really annoying, and most manufacturers do not put up giant warnings about this. So how hard is it to do the DD encoding so that all you need is the spdif output. Arggg.
The Yamaha u100 looks mighty cool, but why is it only 14watts per channel, and no eax. Sure you do not need more than 14 watts per channel, but then again, I would rather it not sound crappy when I crank them to 14w, when distortion kicks in.
I guess that is the major problem with soundcards. They always have a downside to them, making none better than the other. Really I just want opticle 5.1 sound that sounds good, and works. I probably will be waiting for a while. :(
I think the sound card is pretty good since it connects through USB, but it would be even better if it connected through firewire or USB2.
I think that the external audio card is a great idea is because alot of people already have thier pci and isa alot slots used.
The Edirol UA-5 USB Digital Audio Capture device might be what you want. Although it still needs external power so it is not completely portable. And for $300US it is not a bad price.
-- I can't say enough in 120 chars!
Actually, I cheat - I already generate my sound outside of the computer box. I have a SB Live! card that's digitally connected to a Cambrigde Soundworks Digital (the DTT3500) - the 5.1 analog sound is generated in that box, 7 feet away from the computer.
From the Cambridge Soundworks box, there's just speaker cables.
Crystal Falcon
This looks like a great idea. I'd like to see more technology developed for the home music maker.
Does anyone have any expreience with the new breed of "PC friendly" receivers such as the JVC RX-901, Yamaha RP-U200, or HK AVR-8000.
and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers
It's a slippery slope between "32 Voices" (Who actually uses the synth in their sound card anyway? Tell me about the D/A converters, not crap like that) and today's "200 Watt" computer speakers which display efficiency in defiance of the basic physics law of conservation of energy by being powered off a 9V 300mA wall wart.
Yeah, admittedly, Joe Consumer is a fool, too stupid to be entrusted to spend his dollar intelligently. VHS vs. Beta, Commodore 64 vs. TI-99/4A, IBM PC vs. Amiga. Yeah, it *is* a niche market. But a niche market with money, educated consumers who are conscious of quality. If that no longer existed, Maytags and Macintoshes would be gone.
I'll take a little comfort in knowing that there are at least a couple of companies that pride themselves on innovation without sacrificing quality.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.