Hi there!

Does any of you Germans know an online shop that sells the Chaintech AV-710 or any other sound card that uses the VIA Envy chip and doesn't cost more than ~30 €?
I found the card on US shops, but the shipping is 30 €.

Regards,
Sebastian

There was a similar thread a while back. There is a URL in the last post, but I haven't tried it.

I don't understand why they seem so difficult to get hold of in Europe.

If you can't find it, the next best thing is the Hercules Fortissimo 4, it has decent dacs for all channels. But the price is higher, i bought for about 50 euros. Good luck finding a AV-710, also remember that it could be called SAV-710.

Will this link help ?

http://www.chaintechusa.com/tw/eng/distrib...?ASNo=5&CSNo=67

Thanks for the link, but none of the shops there have the card. Some shops aren't even online any longer. At least I found the Hercules on Alternate and Wave Computersysteme.

i'm also from germany, and have had no luck getting the Chaintech - i've also contacted the official retailers named on the Chaintech site, but none of them had the AV-710.

Old thread... Anyways, I got the Hercules Fortissimo 4 instead.

Alternate, Wave and MIX are the same.

The Fortissimo IV looks like a really good sound card for that price. Sebastian, can you tell me whether it has bus noise?

Yep:

Oh sorry, haven't read the thread very carefully.

Hehe, the quote is from another thread .

What exactly is causing this noise, BTW? Is it the motherboard? Is there something I can do against it (other than buying a new MB if that is the cause)?

Yep, it's the motherboard. I think it is inevitable with on-board sound and but higher quality PCI sound cards will eventually have means to shield themselves from the EM noise of the motherboard... but apparently this is not the case with the Fortissimo IV.

I'm not sure why this phenomena exists and whether the noise is distributed through the actual (PCI) bus wirings or by electromagnetic radiation inside the Faraday cage that we normally call "my PC", but it is a common problem in most PCs, therefore the best way to get rid off it is to use external sound devices. But that's not what I want to do.

Hmm, crap. I am planning to get a new PC when I move out from my parents in a year or so and was hoping to be able to use some components I bought which my dad does not require. One of the components was the Hercules. I thought only "shittily" designed mainboard would suffer from this problem, but if you say that it's a common problem, this means that chances are good that I am going to hear bus noise in the new PC, too.

Yes, and what I meant was that you cannot count on a brand name like Intel, Creative, Asus, MSI, etc when you want to make the right choice. It's not really predictable IMHO. You might believe that changing from a VIA chipset to a Intel chipset will help, but in the end it's not that simple...

This problem bothers me, too. It's not like that bus noise is very audible but sometimes when using a GUI element such as a scrollbar, I can hear it when I had the volume set a little bit higher than usual. If anyone knows more about this and what exactly causes this, I'd be happy to hear it. It's not like the famous KT133 bug since I don't have a KT133 and I don't get data errors either... seems to be a fundamental problem that has something to do with EM noise induction instead of actual PCI bus timing problems.

I have an ASUS motherboard with onboard sound and have absolutely no problems with the sound quality. I have it running to my Boston Acoustic sub and from my sub to 2 sattelite speakers.

Sounds pretty good to me.
JXL

BTW, I have no idea why, but my PC is generating some noise when accessing the RAM, too. The funny thing is that this noise does not come out of the speakers because I have them turned off. I remember reading in the c't that some bad coils, elcos or something can start making noise.

Yes, coils can make noise when the load changes abruptly (for instance with Cool N Quiet). The coil starts to oscillate audibly. You can stop this with "Plastik spray" (spray over the coil.. but it stinks like hell) or with a glue gun (put a drop of glue at the base of the coil). Those coils are not defective though, it happens with brand new devices too sometimes.

What can in some instances help is to use a different PCI slot for the card as the card might then be further away from the parts that cause the interferences. In a PC that I used about 8 years ago, if I put the sound card next to the graphics card, every graphics operation, even moving the mouse caused some audible noise.

Yes, but this (and probably what I said about the c't article) wouldn't explain why some "ssssss"ing noise is heard when scrolling a website in Firefox or when moving a window around.



I already tried this. I also tried the same with my old Hauppauge card which constantly led to BSODs telling me something about an IRQ conflict. The same TV card workes flawlessly in my friend's PC.

With each day passing, I think my PC sucks.

What mainboard do you have?
(And, while I'm asking, what PSU?...)

I have no idea about the PSU, never checked. I got a pre-made system by FujitsuSiemens.

The mainboard seems to be OEM and is made by Gigabyte. The model is GA-8SGXL. The southbridge is SiS 648FX. RAM is Corsair Value Select (2x512 MB).

Oh, ok... never heard anything about that hardware... not any good things either Anyway, without saying bad thing about SiS chipsets (which have had good reviews), the presence of a SiS chipset still implies a budget mainboard...

If the cause of this is a bad PSU that would be good. They're easier to replace than all the other stuff...

Interesting, Razer has a new gaming sound card that is supposed to lower / prevent noise caused by electromagnetic interference: http://www.razerzone.com/Products/Gaming-A...ing-Sound-Card/

That's interesting. I have never seen this before. There are no technical specifications unfortunatly. Very high SNR though.