Hi all,
I am looking for a sound card that meets the following requirements:

- good D/A conversion, my old SB Live and the current Asus P4C800 onboard-chip (AD1985-codec) sound clear enough but have too much treble and smeared, weak bass reproduction as well as the typical 'coldness' of cheap DACs.

- good Linux support. Most cards are well-supported these days with the ALSA-drivers integrated into kernel 2.6 so it should not be an issue, but maybe someone here can still give me additional information.

- low price, should not be significantly >100 EUR

- if possible, working SP/DIF-out. Old articles I read at several sources were talking about wrong voltage levels and all kinds of other violations of the standard by all cheap cards, I don't know if this has changed.

As you might have guessed, the card will not be used for gaming at all, but only for music & stereo downmixed movie sound playback.
My audio hardware: Yamaha AX590 amp, Canton Ergo 100 DC. Additionally, I have an Sony DTC690 DAT-Recorder that I just tried to use as a D/A-converter with the coaxial SP/DIF output of the onboard-soundchip. This did not really work, the output level is too high and the sound gets distorted. Too bad, could have saved me buying a sound card, even if I could not even control the volume by software anymore when using the digital out.

I first considered the Terratec Aureon 5.1 but its SP/DIF-out is optical only and I hate these Toslink cables. At least Terratec's history of bad driver support doesn't matter with the Linux drivers being purely chipset/codec based..
The Audigy 2 is said to sound worse but I don't know if I would hear the difference with my amp/speakers and the music I listen to - mostly Metal, hardly ever calm material so the SnR and slight nuances would not be an issue, but clipping has been a big one with all SB cards I have owned. A defined, tight bass is important since my speakers are reproducing these very accurately and those double-bass-attacks need to kick butt :=). Crisp, clear high freqs for the cymbals can't hurt either.
Anyhow, I then took a look at the M-Audio Revolution but it's unavailable here at most dealers and costs twice as much as the Terratec.

Too bad that no sound card with nothing but a good D/A-converter exists, instead they all come with this EAX and Surround-stuff along with software I don't need.. any ideas about what I should get?

The sound gets distorted on spdif out? This is very weird... you might consider retrying before spending money on a new card. The AD1985 even supports non-resampled digital output and should do fine through a DAT deck.

Check the driver settings and the player settings. Perhaps there were sample rate inconsistensies (only reason for distortion of a digital stream I can think of at the moment).

Hm, maybe it's not AD1985 after all =). I'm a bit confused by all this.

These are some of the modules that need to be loaded:
snd_intel8x0 27460 5
snd_ac97_codec 53892 1 snd_intel8x0

And this is the device:
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

Device #0,0 is analog and #0,4 the digital output. And it definitely sounds like the level is too high, I had to turn down the amp's volume since I tested this at night .

And this guy seems to have the same problem: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/sh...highlight=spdif

Maybe the SP/DIF is as bad as on old soundcards and the Windows driver is silently doing some workarounds by reducing the amplitude in software or so.. would not be the first time crappy hardware needs its proprietary driver to work right, seems to be a common pattern these days.
But even if it worked, I still can't control anything about the output, not even the volume (the mixer gives me some weird volume setting with 0, 33, 67 and 100% that doesn't do anything) plus the codec cannot mix multiple voices in hardware at all. So I'll probably get a sound card at any rate.

edit: /dev/sndstat confuses me even more, amonst other output it displays this:
Card config:
Intel ICH5 at 0xfebff800, irq 17
Mixers:
0: Analog Devices AD1985

Volume control of the AD1985 probably works in the analog domain. So the spdif stream is not attenuated when main volume settings are changed.

The guy in the link you posted seems to have sampling rate problems, like I thought you have too:

I just stumbled over some interesting things here.
You were right - I thought the output was always converted to 48 KHz by the driver, but it was not. I now set up rate conversion explicitly and it works.

However, ALSA's sample rate converter only uses linear interpolation, and the static noise this produces is clearly audible now through the DAT-deck's DAC/output.
Therefore, some sound cards that cannot convert sample rates in hardware are not really useable under Linux right now if one values quality! Astounding, this seems to be widely unknown. I read that the M-Audio Revo cannot convert in hardware. Now the question is, which sound cards can natively play which sampling frequencies and which can convert in hardware? I need both 44.1 and 48 KHz since I am also watching movies through the machine.

Maybe this information should be put into the FAQ or something? Might save some people from getting bad sound with a good card..

Cards that convert sample rates in hardware support virtually any sample rate imaginable, such as 44,099Hz if you wanted. It simply resamples everything (usually to 48kHz) before it plays it.

Cards that don't resample support a wide range of common sampling rates, such as 11, 22, 44, 48, 96, etc... I once had a Yamaha OPL3-SAx card, and it didn't resample... I wanted to play a file recorded at 33kHz and it wouldn't do it... it supported 32 though, and that worked.

doing some simple googling, i found out that the Revolution supports 32, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 172.4, and 192kHz. You'll be fine, for the most part. It seems like you may encounter problems playing low quality streams with 22kHz, and i don't know why that rate wasn't included... it really isn't much of an issue though.

Anyway, I too am an Linux user, and am considering buying a Revolution or Audiophile card in the future. Software for converting sampling rates at high quality are available, and can be incorporated into the ALSA code. You could then, hypothetically, set up the driver to resample everything internally with the high quality resampler, or just resample unsupported rates... this sort of thing shouldn't be difficult to implement, especially considering that the drivers have the ability to do low-quality resampling already.

Okay, I misread that post about the Revo. It was talking about the fact that it cannot _mix_ in hardware, so when multiple programs are playing sound at the same time, it all needs to get resampled to a common sample rate by the ALSA driver. This would not be a problem for me. Thanks for making this clear.
Anyhow, I now have to buy a sound card only because of the low quality resampling :|.
On the other hand, the DAT's DAC sounds very good but there are a few annoying issues, for example the SP/DIF-out gets disabled every time the device gets closed, and the DAT needs about a second to enable output again from this state. So I would need the crossfade plugin to avoid the digital-out getting toggled off/on on track changes, since XMMS usually closes the audio device after every track.
Also, cheap audio solutions often have quality issues with digital-out anyway and I'm especially expecting this with onboard sound. Sigh.. why isn't there a simple PCI card providing coaxial SP/DIF and that's it? It's ridiculous when I think about the fact that I can get a Fast Ethernet board for less than 8 EUR.

Like I said, according to the specs of the AD1985, it supports unresampled spdif at 44kHz. So if you don't need mixing, what you need to figure out is how to set the spdif clock to 44kHz.


There is: http://www.trust.nl/products/product.htm?artnr=12950
It is CMI8738 based, and thus should support 44 and 48kHz without resampling. I'm not sure about the clock quality though. It is a budget-brand after all... it may be worse than onboard spdif...

Alternatively, you might try to get yourself a second hand M-Audio DIO2448. Same chip, professional build quality.

Reading the docu & hints page of the ALSA driver for the i820, it seems like many current implementations of onboard sound systems indeed do not support 44.1 KHz SPDIF. Maybe the reason is that my board does use AC97 for whatever, the kernel module is listed as in use by the i8x0 driver.

I took a look at that offer from trust.nl but the card is not that much cheaper than a Terratec Sky 5.1. That card could have better sound through its Wolfson DAC than the DAT deck, couldn't it?

Listening to Dark Tranquillity's "Damage Done" over the SPDIF right now. The funny thing is, this sounds better to my (bad) ears than any sound card I have owned so far, even in spite of the bad sample rate conversion :=). No more blurred, weak bass. That tells a lot about the SB Live and this onboard sound..

Anyhow, I got the Terratec Aureon Sky 5.1 today and I have to say I'm very pleased with the sound, it's as good as from any reasonably priced HiFi standalone device at least to my ears. Volume control and mixing are far inferior to Linux' SB emu10k1 driver but I can live with that.
Thanks for all the help and suggestions.