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Computer Audio - To USB or Not to USB?
Tom asks: "The time has come for me to upgrade the audio on my computer. This was last discussed, here.My specific area of interest, is the sound card, in its various embodiments. Two cards that I am considering are Creative Labs' Audigy2, and M-Audio's Revolution 7.1. These companies also have USB counterparts to their products - the Extigy and the Sonica Theatre - and I can't decide if USB's portability and other various advantages justify its shortcomings. Experiences, anyone?"
I got an M-Audio USB unit, and I was amazed by the sound quality improvement over the built-in audio on my Mac... and Macs are known for having pretty good audio to start with.
No problems digitizing at 24 bit accuracy across USB 1.1.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
1) i can't tell if the bandwidth of these things is really an issue. 6 channels at cd quality comes to 4.233 megabits. 192/24/6= 27 megabits. so it would seem that regular usb would be too slow, i guess, but that's in the spec of several of the usb audio boxes, so i just don't know what's going on.
2) usb would certainly remove grounding, computer noise, etc., but so would optical digital connections. i have my stereo hooked up to a pc with a terratec aureon 7.1 space card, about $150us, and my connection has never sounded better.
it passes through dvd audio with no probs, and, for my vinyl-to-digital needs, it has digital in AND out on the back of the card.
i would have gone with a creative, but they don't have such specs, and the cheapest other card i found that did was $400.
it also has support in the linux kernel, which i'll be testing after i build a new music & video machine. actually, i think i might whip out knoppix here in a moment...
oh, it also looks very well made. everything is labeled nicely, too.
3) the dominance of creative is not good, i don't think, but i can't think of any way to help the situation. i would have bought one had they had what i needed...
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I have had incredibly bad luck with it, particularly with the Edirol UA-3 and UA-3D. I do some semi-professional audio mastering for a Dharma group, and I have _never_ gotten a clean recording. Usually I get little glitches every five or ten minutes. I wound up having to buy a PCI card to do the digitization. Of course, I'm doing S/PDIF digital audio, so I don't have to worry about noise from the power supply.
I have had pretty good luck with the pair of SoundSticks that I got for Christmas last year, which are USB *output* devices. They occasionally glitch out when the screen saver goes off (this is on MacOS X), but the audio quality is great otherwise - I've never heard a glitch on output other than with the screen saver.
I bought a JVC reciever about six months ago ('cause the ex spilled a coke in the old one) and it happened to have a USB "input" (USB-B connector) on the front.
/dev/dsp1. Now I have mplayer set up to use that device for audio output, and everything else uses /dev/dsp (lame built in sound on my MB connected to lame speakers built into my display).
I didn't think much of it when I bought it, figured it'd be a windows only thing anyway. One day my system was off, for a hardware upgrade IIRC, and I plugged in the reciever on a whim.
RH9's kudzu picked it up and set it up as
It all works out really well, and the sound through the reciever is great.
The one downside to consider ist that you can only play audio CDs through a USB sound device by using CDDA, which is less than ideal. Uses a lot of CPU and IDE bandwidth and still skips from time to time. (For me, anyway.)
Good luck!
-Peter