Malcolm Baldridge wrote: > Egads, I know I'm being a bit lazy and irresponsible tossing such a basic > question into this list, but I'm hoping to cut through most of the forest > of data to hone in to the right area. > > I think I'm "done" with messing about with various motherboard audio > hardware - it's pretty noisy and has quite a few limitations I'm starting > to find annoying. > > I have a (genuine) Aureal A3D Vortex2 PCI card in my stockpile of hardware, > but the support on both Wintendo and Linux seems iffy at best. I recommend the M-Audio cards, like the Audiophile 2496 card. It rocks, and is a cut way above consumer/gamer cards. It's about $200.00 retail, but check on E-Bay, you can probably find it for a bit less. It has good support under ALSA (and is controllable with the envy24control utility that is part of the alsa-tools package). Check out http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.main&ID=adf95efc30b88aba043fa8b83343bfb8 M-Audio makes lots of other cards that are decent, including USB based audio devices. They also make some decently priced near-field studio monitors. -- Brett
