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PCI Sound Card Recommendations for Linux? 39

Posted by Cliff from the here-we-go-again dept.
Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks: "The most recent "Ask Slashdot" about sound cards is over a year old and pople were suggesting SB16 and AWE, then. Now, I think it's time to move to PCI sound cards. Which ones do you all recommend."
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PCI Sound Card Recommendations for Linux? More

PCI Sound Card Recommendations for Linux?

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  • I chose the Creative Sound Blaster PCI 64. It's cheap, does not use up many ressources and is well supported with the newer (2.2.x) Kernels.
    The ALSA Project [alsa-project.org] also supports the chip on the card (Ensoniq ES1370 or ES1371) but I never used the ALSA drivers.

  • Trident 4D Wave NX (Score:3)

    by Eric Sharkey ( 1717 ) <sharkey@lisaneric.org> on Wednesday October 13, 1999 @01:01AM (#1617818)
    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 [hoontech.com] for example.

    See John Fulmer's lengthy review [screwdriver.net].
  • Personally, I use an EnsoniqPCI sound card. It's about half the cost of the SoundBlaster PCI64, uses the ES1370 chip, and its system resource useage is barely noticable. I got mine at a local show for about $20. The big downside appears to be that it doesn't work as well in games under Windows, but I can't get Windows to boot on my machine so what do I care.
  • I am not much of a sound guru (at all actually) but I went with the SB Live because of its overall quality in general. With my dual boot, most of my sound use is in Windows anyway. What discouraged me was the driver situation, Creative is not open sourcing the specs for this card, and they claim to be doing development of the driver, but I am not sure how far along they are. ALSA seems to have blacklisted this card and Creative because of their stance on OPen Source, which while I understand, may not be the best position for ALSA...Rather than dropping all communication, they should be putting even more pressure on creative to come out with a good driver, so that in the future either Creative will know do write a good driver, or they will know the pressure is coming and will decide to open source it. Sound support is definitely something that will have to get better if Linux is to become a viable desktop solution.
  • Try www.hoontech.co.kr [hoontech.co.kr] - .com didn't work for me.
  • The only way to convince Sound Blaster to change its policy is to make a dent in its bottom line. Sure, there are drivers for Linux, but what about the *BSD's?

    Do the whole open-source community a favor:

    • Buy a different card from a friendlier company.
    • Don't buy an SB Live.
    • Send Sound Blaster some polite feedback [sblive.com]. Tell them you considered buying an SB Live, but decided against it because of the lack of open-source drivers and programming specs. Tell them what sound card you did buy.

    If enough people send polite, intelligent feedback, Sound Blaster will have little choice but to release the specs. Until then, please don't buy an SB Live!

  • Off topic, but does anyone know if I could stuff a PCI & ISA soundcard in my PC, using the PCI for Windows & ISA one for linux? It's seems like there shouldn't be any problems, but doesn't everything seem easy on paper? Just try it you say, but I am not willing to hand out a hard earned $10 just to find out it doesn't work!
    ;)

  • I'm currently using 2 PCI cards in my system. I have a Soundblaster PCI64 for linux, and a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 for Windows. Hopefully, I'll be able to take out the soundblaster when the MX300 is *finally* supported with opensound, but until then I'm happy with my setup.

  • Re:SB Live (Score:3)

    by kcarnold ( 99900 ) on Wednesday October 13, 1999 @11:14AM (#1617827)
    FYI: If anyone following this is too lazy to find the site themselves (and all too many of us are), the website in question is http://developer.soundblaster.com/linux [soundblaster.com] .

    Kenneth Arnold

  • www.alsa-project.org -- This has an excellent driver for the 4D wave. Plus, Alsa beats the hell out of OSS.
  • Funny you mention Windows Sound Problems. After re-installing Windows 98 and the newest drivers I did not encounter any sound-related problems.
    And the only reason I still have Windows on my disk is games :-).
  • Looks like they've been swallowed up by the notoriously Linux-unfriendly Creative Labs.

    I just looked for the Ensoniq card at Shopper.com and it came up as Creative Labs Ensoniq Audio PCI sound card. Three places have it in stock for $15 or less.

    Checked the Ensoniq.com site and they "are now the OEM business unit of Creative Labs"..."we will continue to provide web based support to those end customers who purchased Ensoniq soundcards directly from Ensoniq. (at least for the next few months until Creative's customer service department is trained on the product)."

    The site has Windows drivers for the "Ensoniq Audio PCI card", and a warning that they won't work with the "Creative Labs Ensoniq Audio PCI card".


  • Windows dosn't care if you have two or more soundcards in your machine. It will only use one at a time. This way, you could use one for recording purposes only, and the other for playback, or any other way. Sort of like dual processors in 9x. It will only use one of them at a time.
  • I've been very happy with the Creative/Ensoniq AudioPCI cards (es1370/1371). With the driver compiled as a module, just modprobing detects and loads the driver for every ES1371 card in your machine (up to 8, I believe... but I haven't found a motherboard with that many PCI slots yet). They're relatively cheap, and play/record relatively well. I use them along with SLab to do multitrack recording & mixing.
  • I have to say, when I saw this article, the first thing I thought of was the Ensoniq AudioPCI I have in my computer. It is a very good sound card, and it's PCI, and I got it from 20 bucks from a friend who works at a computer shop (along with the rest of the computer *grin*) The Linux driver support is excellent; although the card does not do native MIDI, it has two DSP's, and the Windows drivers use one DSP for PCM and the other for MIDI. Under Linux, you can use both DSP's for whatever you want (/dev/{dsp0,dsp1}). I had xmms and an emulator going at once, one time :) If you want MIDI with it, use Timidity. Glancing through the comments, overall people seem to agree with my choice :)
  • well i use a sb128 and it of course configures fine with kernel, oss, or whatever sound drivers you choose to use.
    the best part about this card is it has 2 speaker jacks, front and rear speakers. it also has a headphones jack a mic jack and a joystick port.
    great quality and we all know SB are really good sound cards, ever since my old sb16 ;)

    tyler
  • Alright, I have had in my current PC two soundcards at various points in time - a PCI Turtle Beach Montego and an ISA Sound Blaster AWE 64. Now, I couldn't find any drivers for the Montego and as far as I know they don't exist - but the AWE 64 was very well supported in Linux. Since then, my Montego has gotten messed up somehow, but the AWE works great still, both under Windows and Linux... and it sounds better on MP3s than the Montego ever did. What I'm getting at is that unless you have no free ISA slots or own a computer with a motherboard that has no ISA slots on it, I would recommend getting an ISA soundcard. They are cheap and work well, especially the AWE. But I'm sure that someone has a convincing arguement against my view, so here's the question - what functionality does a PCI soundcard provide in Linux that is not found in a comparable ISA soundcard? :)
  • think twice about this one. I have one and the fact that it doesnt play au's in hardware has caused me a lot of trouble. (Some sw for unix dont include a linear option)

    Sometimes the sound quality doesnt seem right
    and i've heard of skipping.

    You might want to go somewhere else if you want more than just mp3s using xmms.
  • Surprised I was

    Q.B2- I want to develop Live drivers -- why can't I have the specifications for the EMU10K1?
    It may be possible for us to arrange to get you specifications -- please contact us at linux_bug@soundblaster.com.

    very much

    and a full featured non-beta driver by Q1 2000

    im buying me an SB Live
  • If you need to drive unamplified speakers, a power amp is necessary. You need to add your own heat sink, however
  • I asked this of OSS a couple of weeks back (wanting to get rid of my SB Live! because of the driver situation) and they suggested the SB128.
  • I'm using an ensoniq es1370 based card under linux. It works very well and has excellent sound and is very quiet noise wise. I've used it to record live tracks and it does an excellent job at this. It also requires fewer cpu cycles than an ISA based card. PCI is not only a faster bus, but a more efficient one. The cpu is able to service hardware interrupts through it faster than it can through the ISA bus. Believe it or not a soundcard does use up cpu cycles when it is used. If you have a component that grabs CPU time, and they all do, your system will run better if its PCI based. This is why some people will try and tell you that your system will run faster if you get rid of all your ISA cards. Some people interpret this to mean that if you get rid of all your ISA cards, your ISA bus will just sit there idle and not do anything and that this is the reason for the speed increase. This isn't the case though. The speed increase comes from the fact that your cards get serviced more quickly on PCI, not because ISA isn't being used anymore. In fact ISA is being used. Things like serial ports, parallel ports, the floppy port. All these are branched off of the ISA bus. Like everything else however, they only use CPU cycles when they are in use.
  • I have the Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI card, i.e. the a card made after Creative bought Ensoniq. This card works great in Windows, but the Linux drivers suck. When people talk about how great and low noise the Ensoniq is they are referring to the ES1371 that was used before Creative bought it. Congratulations if you already have one, but if you don't, don't buy one.

    I haven't tried the ALSA drivers, but the OSS drivers cause static in the sound output.
  • I got mine like a year ago, but lately it started giving me really odd problems, 'specially in games. Terrible sound corruption, echoing and the worst when playing Q3 -- the sound was 2-to-6 seconds behind the action. I got fed up with ti yesterday and go an el cheapo Asound PCI for 15 bucks. enough to tide me over until I decide betwean the SB128 and SB512(Live).
  • Where can I get a SB128? I just ran a web search and came up with few hits. Is this an OEM-only card?
  • Yo fool, SBL does not work with Linux. CL did not release the necessary info for driver writing. I suggest the original SB16, AWE[32/64] or a PCI[64/128/512]. They are great and work just as well.

  • PCI Sound Cards == bad, here's why (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They lack on board MIDI ram. Anyone who touts the superior speed of a PCI sound card, can run a little test:

    Take a 2-4mb mod (a .s3m or .xm file, most likely a .xm) and play it using mikmod on the PCI audiopci, then the extended module player (xmp) on the isa awe64. The PCI card uses PC RAM to store and play out the samples, as well as do the mixing. XMP with the AWE64 sets up so that all the samples are uploaded into the AWE64's on board RAM, so the AWE64 plays the samples and takes that load off the CPU, requiring the cpu to do only sequencing. What this comes out to is when you compare the load averages, xmp/AWE64 plays with far less cpu load than mikmod for any mod, AND .. AND it sounds better. Worse yet as your mod samples go up to 2 or 4 megs of total samples, you'll notice a PII-400 will drop to its knees trying to play it through an AudioPCI - but the AWE64 will yield a very low cpu load.

    A demonstration? okay let me show you Baghdad Groove, aka k_bag.xm (look it up on kosmic.org), which is ONLY 1164K of samples.

    Playing it through my AudioPCI with mikmod:
    nobody 930 58.3 1.2 3732 3256 p5 R 22:08 0:09 mikmod k_bag.xm
    (and it starts to ramp up after this... so much so that on my PII-400, it starts to skip)

    Playing it through my AWE64 with xmp:
    root 937 4.6 1.0 3324 2796 p5 S 22:10 0:01 xmp -Ddev /dev/sequencer k_bag.xm
    (and the burden ramps downwards as this is the initial "upload to the sound card RAM" phase which is process intensive..2 seconds later it goes from 4.6 to 2.2)


    So while the PCI card is faster because of the PCI port, PCI cards are worse for MIDI and Mod songs because they lack on board RAM - and no matter how blazingly fast a sound card is, you will not ever compensate for on board RAM for MIDI or Mod music.

    However, for mp3's, the PCI cards are superior, though I cannot measure the margin on my process list.

    The problem with PCI cards is an ethics issue. In the past, cards would have on board RAM. This new el cheapo design they're coming out with now, lacks this. It starts farming out work to the PC instead of handling the work itself (like storing sound samples for sequencing). This is also true of PCI modems (aka winmodems, modems which rely on your PC's DSP to do its work .. if your winmodem driver frazzles, BOOM, byebye connection..and it also puts an extra load on your PC too!).

    But nowhere is the error of the PCI sound card / PCI modem / PCI reduced features card design, more evident.....
    than...
    AGP cards using shared RAM! Oooooh you have got to see those babies in action. They are monuments to inefficiency. They use PC RAM for display RAM which ABSOLUTELY should be built onto the card. The performance of these cards is drastically, drastically reduced by using PC RAM. Go to Circuit City and see some for yourself - and try playing Half Life or Quake 3 on them. You will be sorry.

    The lesson is that there is no honorable future in cards that farm all the work they used to do, to the PC. The Amiga had it right, these PCI hardware goons don't.
  • This is not related to linux in particular, but this is always something i have needed to get off my chest: I work in a multimedia company where we always buy top quality sound/video hardware. I thought Creative Labs a good reputation, but out of all our soundcards, the WORST signal to noise ratio (we are talking alot of noise here) comes from the creative boards?!

    So much noise (static) that we cannot use them for much other than just listening ourselves! The best boards are the ones onboard the intel motherboards (can't remember the chipset off hand). So although they might be well supported under linux, it might pay to look at alternatives...
  • This comparison isn't completely vaild. While the memory may be an issue, you're comparing an ISA card that has hardware support for wavetable\midi with a PCI card that has no hardware acceleration for these features. The reason you were getting different performance isn't because of a lack of onboard memory, it's because the card doesn't even support hardware acceleration of that media. If you used xmp to compare the AWE64 with a PCI card that was also supported by xmp, and ran them both under xmp to test, then you'd come out with a valid comparison. As it is, you're not even testing using the same mod player, even though xmp has a software mode.

    As for the entire AGP thing, the way AGP has been implemented in every card I've seen is that the card still mainly relies on onboard memory while the AGP bus allows for quick transfers from main memory when you've used up the board's memory. The same thing occurs with a PCI video card, except for the fact the PCI bus is slower and has less bandwidth.
    And as for the comment that there is no honorable future for cards that make the CPU do the work, you're right. The only things I've seen that use this idea tend to sell to the lower-end market. New 3D accelerators are actually taking more work *away* from the processor as they're now doing transform and lighting, a function that was previously left to the CPU.

    Please make vaild comparisons, or at least check your facts.
  • I bought one of those cards a while ago.
    I believe it was SB PCI64V to be exact.
    Whatever you do, don't buy it!
    There should be an es1371 chip on the card and
    that's what it told my computer.
    At start-up the ID was 1371, /proc/pci (Linux)
    was nice enough to let me know as well.
    So i tried the es1371 module (*duh*) but it just
    wouldn't work. I got a copy of the alsa modules,
    but that didn't work either.
    After some thorough investigation i found out that
    there was an es1373 chip on the card, instead of
    the es1371 that's supposed to be on it.
    Ofcourse i tried to contact Creative about this.
    The helpdesk on their website didn't even read my
    posting. The told me it was not a `retail product'
    and give me an URL with drivers for win95.
    So i tried the primitive method of communication
    and picked up the phone. The same story here.
    In other words, Creative just f**ks you over and
    says "sorry, you should have bought a more expensive product."

    That's all i have to say about that.

  • Anyone's got a PCMCIA soundcard?

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