Dear alsa users,
We are looking for a replacement card for PCI(e) audio that we are using
in our linguistics laboratory. We have been quite happy with the older
ASUS Xonar D2 pci and ASUS Essence STX II PCIe cards. Unfortunately,
these are out of stock in the Netherlands, I don't know whether they are
still being made. We need quite a number of those devices in roughly
15-25 pc's in our labs. So they were good value for money at roughly 200
euro or dollars each. The xonars worked out of the box on recent
versions of Ubuntu and this great to have so we do not have to make
small adjustments to the all pc's in the lab.
Some background on psychology/linguistics research. We are looking for a
sound card that is easy to use, and without many "expert" features. For
quality speech recordings we are looking for devices that has a high
signal to noise ratio (in practice we used an analog mic preamp and put
the preamps output in the line out of the preamp in the line in of the
xonar cards). Also we like to record as naturally as possible and we
don't value Digital signal processors (DSPs) that mimics special preamps.
Additionally, cards using DSPs might have an internal buffer in which
they do there processing and take additional latency. In artificial
grammar learning or other types of experiments in which speech stimuli
are presented to participant in our lab we greatly value the timing of
the presentation of those speech stimuli. That is: we try to schedule a
stimulus (speech or another sound) with 1ms accuracy. So If we know that
ALSA or another backend uses a eg. 20ms playback/software buffer, we
schedule the stimulus 20 ms ahead of time. We would like to keep any
buffering delays as short as reasonably possible.
So coming back to the original question, the Xonars we were working with
ran fine in for example Ubuntu-18.04 and even some older distributions.
We would like to find a nice replacement that meets the requirements of
a linguistics lab and are relatively easy to maintain. I don't know if
this is the right place to ask, but I hope to get some input for we have
tried quite a number of PCI(e) devices from expensive RME equipment to
cheaper Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus or very cheap TERRATEC Aureon
devices. Perhaps we should move to USB class 1 and/or 2 compliant devices.
Hopefully some of you have experience with such equipment and is willing
to give us a nice suggestion.
Best regards and thank you for your time,
Maarten
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