PCI Sound Card Recommendations for Linux? 39
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."
The SB PCI 64 is OK for me... (Score:1)
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)
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].
Re:The SB PCI 64 is OK for me... (Score:1)
SB Live (Score:1)
Re:Trident 4D Wave NX (Score:1)
Please dont buy an SB Live (Score:2)
Do the whole open-source community a favor:
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!
Two soundcards in one machine? (Score:1)
;)
Re:Two soundcards in one machine? (Score:1)
Re:SB Live (Score:3)
Kenneth Arnold
Re:Trident 4D Wave NX (Score:2)
Re:The SB PCI 64 is OK for me... (Score:1)
And the only reason I still have Windows on my disk is games
Alas- "Ensoniq Is Now Creative Labs" (Score:2)
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".
Re:Two soundcards in one machine? (Score:1)
Multiple Sound Cards - The Easy Way (Score:1)
ensoniq is the way to go (Score:1)
sb128 all the way (Score:1)
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
Just an honest question... (Score:1)
ensoniq (Score:1)
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.
Re:SB Live (Score:1)
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
sb128 also has a power amp (Score:1)
PCI Soundcard (Score:1)
Lower CPU utilization (Score:1)
Be careful of the Creative version (Score:1)
I haven't tried the ALSA drivers, but the OSS drivers cause static in the sound output.
Re:The SB PCI 64 is OK for me... (Score:1)
Re:sb128 all the way (Score:1)
Re:SB Live (Score:1)
PCI Sound Cards == bad, here's why (Score:1)
Take a 2-4mb mod (a
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
(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
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.
Creative Labs (Score:1)
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...
Re:PCI Sound Cards == bad, here's why (Score:1)
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.
Re:The SB PCI 64 is OK for me... (Score:1)
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,
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.
How about PCMCIA? (Score:1)