My computer audio has a lot of hiss when amplified, which I'm almost certain is coming from video card/mobo interference. I'm guessing an external soundcard would be the best solution, but I've heard other options mentioned on these forums. (External DAC converter? I'm not really sure what all the possibilities are.)

What should I get if I want the following things:

• less than $200
• really good sound quality
• stereo line in, suitable for recording from phono preamp
• headphone out
• volume control
• (bonus) higher than 16bit/48KHz input/output

The M-Audio external USB devices look really nice, but I don't know how good the sound quality is, so I thought I'd ask the experts.

There are many professional and semipro PCI soundcards from which you will hear no noise, unless perhaps something is seriously wrong with the computer. If you are set on external, look at the EMU 0404 USB and 0202 USB (both require USB 2).

Soundwise I would stay clear of m-audio cards...

Can you be more verbose or provide any reference for that?

Just my general experience. I've had/tried several m-audio cards (firewire 410 the longest) & through the years there've been driver issues but 1st & foremost I've always been very dissapointed with SQ. Of course this is a matter of taste, but generally they have a "harsch", "distorted" sound I personally dislike & in the "rec. audio world" m-audio is somewhat known for this.

A concrete example: try an m-audio 410 side by side with a presonus firebox (app. same pricerange), the diff is huge!

Now, if the difference is huge you should have no problem in telling in a blind test (ABX for example) a piece of music ripped from a CD from the same piece played back and recorded in loopback not one, but 3 times with a consumer M-Audio card such as the Audiophile 2496. The original piece of audio is here, the looped back here. These music pieces are compressed with Monkey's Audio lossless compression. The test setup is explained here.

The thing is, so far nobody has been able to tell one file from the other in a proper blind test. Maybe you could also ask the people at rec.audio.pro to check if they can.

M-Audio cards, being very widely used, are without any audio quality problems as far as the great majority are concerned. The specs alone should tell one that distortion is very low indeed.

Many models also contain microphone preamps. These are not the top quality types that sell for thousand of dollars as stand alone units, but they can do a decent job in most circumstances.

Driver issues are another matter and totally dependent upon the individual computer system to which they are being attached. The fact that thousands of other people have no problem doesn't mean you won't.

There's an USB audio device from Behring which I like a lot. It's small, has ASIO drives, and I have runned it from a laptop with acceptable results. And it was much cheaper than M-auido external cards.

I'm using integrated audio at the moment, but this problem also appeared with a Terratec 24/96 on another computer (which unfortunately doesn't work with Vista for me, even using the beta drivers). I'm pretty sure it's the video card, because the distortion changes depending on what I'm running. (I have a fairly top-of-the-line gamer video card, which might cause more distortion than whatever you folks have.)