Re: Recommendation for "high end" hardware mixing PC soundcard?

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Hi Peter!

 On 2007.02.17 at 22:45:32 +0100, Peter wrote next:

> 0) linux people don't care about hardware mixing [why? software mixing in 
> linux is a big building site and was never capable to provide me the comforts 
> and possibilities I got with hardware mixing on the emu10k1 based cards.]

The truth is, "hardware mixing" isn't the hot thing right now. Just like
hardware MIDI synth, it's more or less deprecated. Low-end (like
integrated ones) sound cards don't support it because they must be
cheap. High-end professional cards for musicians don't need it because
it's better to have practically unlimited amount of streams that you can
mix in software with 32-bit precision on any sampling rate than to be
limited in number of streams, sampling rate and mixing/resampling
conversion quality. This doesn't applies to all high-end devices though,
software processing is preferred now, still there is some use for
hardware processors, but these devices are rare and expensive.  As about
middle-ranged cards, they are either about delivering higher quality
sound than onboards cards (models from M-Audio, Terratec) - they don't
need hardware mixing because software works very well nowadays, or about
gaming (Creative cards) - the only ones that truly need hardware mixing,
to unload mixing big amount of streams off processor.

In other words, if you really desire hardware mixing, buy creative card.
Audigy 2, Audigy 4, then X-Fi.. well you know where it leads. So I
suggest you to rethink, maybe you don't need hardware mixing that much
after all.

As a former Live! 5.1 and Audigy 2 ZS user that now uses M-Audio
Audiophile USB, I can tell you that problems with software mixing in
linux aren't that big. If you don't need exceptional sound quality, just
use onboard card; if you do, buying Creative card is wrong. Just buy
something like M-Audio Revolution, Terratec Aureon, or more expensive
ESI Juli@, EMU 1212M instead. Or, better yet, some USB card that feeds
off AC adapter, not USB port - believe me, you won't regret it. I still
have Audigy 2 ZS plugged in, but there is no way I'll use it for playing
back any music - external M-Audio card is so much better when it comes
to audio quality, both analog and digital outputs are much superior
(also integrated headphone amplifier on this model should be mentioned -
not perfect, but better than cheap OP-AMP models like ART HeadAMP).

I use jack as sound server. mplayer supports jack, recent gstreamer
finally has working jackaudiosink, other application either use jack
directly or work via alsa->jack redirection plugin. If you distro
doesn't support jack it might be a little pain to rebuild required
pieces of software with jack support, but it's not that hard, and some
modern distros have very good jack support. Of course, jack isn't the
only solution, but it's the best one if you want to be sure you are not
compromising any quality.

-- 

Vladimir

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