At ~3:32 in the track there's a female voice in the background: "if you can hear this little whisper, you're dying."

Became somehow obvious to me after I changed the SB Live at work with a M-Audio Revo -- very strange...

Interesting. Just when I thought I had heard every sound on every PF studio album, I learn something new. I can hear that line too, though I don't know whether I could have heard it or not with my old soundcard, a Yamaha AC-XG. Now I'm using an Echo Indigo. Even encoded with Vorbis -q 4.25 the voice is perfectly clear to my ears, though I did have to turn it up a little past normal listening volume to hear it since it's "under" everything else.

Since we heard it, maybe it means we're dying...

Freakkky...

BTW How is the Echo Indigo? Very good?

Laters

AgentMil

"And I am not frightened of dying any time will do I
don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it you've gotta go sometime."

"If you can hear this whispering you are dying."

"I never said I was frightened of dying."

I'm very impressed with it, but I haven't personally tested many different cards for a good first-hand comparison. I've used gamer cards like Aureal Vortex I and II cards and a few Creative SB variants. Then the Yamaha that came built-in on my notebook PC, which I was pretty impressed with considering that I'm sure it's an "economy all-purpose card". I got some crackle every now and then with system sounds and sharp transients, and there was that ever present hiss with the volume turned up when there was no sound. But music playback was most often OK.

The Echo is like night and day, though. I never get any "crackling" with system sounds or transients any more, and I like having the analog volume control right next to my keyboard. It's almost like I never gave up the keyboard volume control I had with my old card. There is no hiss that I can hear at all, even with the volume wide open. The quality of the opamp seems to be good, as (the best I can tell) sound quality/transparency is solid right up to as high as I'll ever want to play it, and it drives my Grado SR-80s and my Sony MDR-ED228s straight outta the card just fine, and will drive either louder than I'd ever want to listen. (Although I still prefer using my Xin headphone amp mainly because of the crossfeed feature.) It's also got eight virtual output channels so you can have many sources at once, and the level and balance of each channel is individually adjustable. The two output jacks are handy, too, so I don't have to constantly unplug the speakers to plug in headphones.

There are no inputs on the card, which is fine for me because I haven't needed to do any kind of recording or looping. When I do, I'll buy a dedicated input card (or maybe the IndigoIO). It's worth a little piece of mind to me knowing that all the money and effort they put into this card went entirely into output instead of having to divide their efforts/resources. When I build my next desktop PC, I'll get an M-Audio card (maybe the Audiophile 24/96) to do a side-by-side comparison.

Nice... I was about to purchase the Echo Indigo for my Toshiba Notebook. I think its time to reassess the purchase again .

I also have a Yamaha soundchip on my notebook, I got rid of all the crackle by setting the power setting of the soundchip to full and never power down. That got rid of most of the static and crackle that popped up. Although under heavy load the sound sometimes stutters.

Do you know what Yamaha Chip you have on you notebook?

I need to look mine up again, but I do know it was a Integrated Chip which mean you can find it on Yamaha page under ICs or Integrated Parts and NOT under sound and multimedia.

Laters

AgentMil