Digigram vxpocket 440 laptop card in linux mixer

Digigram vxpocket 440 laptop card in linux mixer plus#

I was intrigued and went looking to find that there are quite a few options out there right now already, and this Creative entry is just yet another addition to the selection list. This may change, or with USB 2.0 it may not.Дuring the 'Lunchbox PC' discussion a couple of days ago the soundcard was brought up as an important factor, and several people mentioned getting an external USB D/A converter. I think the reason nobody's bother to put a 1394 chipset in an external sound box is that if you have Firewire you probably already have decent sound. There have also been a stream of no-brand import USB sound devices from Taiwan over the last couple of years, but finding one when you needed it could be difficult.Д«ased on past performance, Creative's product will probably be less than perfect, but it'll be nice to have another option.ДЇor the person who asked about Firewire - Stereo audio bitrates are fine for USB, you just need to have a little buffering in the device. They recently reissued it as the Edirol UA-3 and added a more upscale 1/3 rack desktop model, the UA-5. I use it with the 7-pin Datman adapter cables from Core Sound to transcribe DAT tapes. Powered by the USB connector, it needs nothing extra & is very light.

Digigram vxpocket 440 laptop card in linux mixer plus#

I have been using the Roland (Edirol) UA-30 with similar features (optical/coax/analog in/out, plus a 2-channel mixer, jacks for guitar & microphone & headphone with a volume dial) for a couple of years. I'm not knocking your hardware hacking skills, I'm just saying that high-end audio cards would, like most other audiophile equipment, be a niche market at best, and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers. However, as an avid gamer, I can attest that positional 3d sound, especially in first-person style games, adds a great deal to the experience and can improve gameplay, especially in games like counter-strike, where one overly loud footstep can mean sudden death. The mainstream can't tell the difference between an mp3 sampled at 128kb/s and one sampled at 196 or 256, and the marginal increase in quality doesn't really justify the space and expense of a better card. An audiophile-class soundcard just doesn't justify the cost which hardware manufacturers would put on it, and doesn't really find much of a practical application for most end-users. I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than '3D Simulation' or '32 voices' or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents. Marketing is propaganda, and never forget that. When is the last time you saw THD measurements for a speaker? They don't do that, because 10% THD is really good behavior for a speaker, and that looks bad next to the. This stuff isn't easy to measure (it's much easier to analyze static signals than dynamic ones), so they produce the numbers that look good instead and claim that this somehow represents quality. The reason for the distinct 'sound' of most audio equipment isn't SNR or THD or bandwidth, but rather how it recovers from overload conditions and how much low-level signal it loses. Your typical 'home theatre' stereo crap is in the 20-30dB range, which basically means it is constantly clipping or recovering from clipping, and much of the low-level detail is lost.

Brutally clip or compress 10dB of peak, and lose 10dB of low-level detail.

So a *really good* system might do 40dB dynamic range (10,000:1 ratio) decently. And even if the amp can pull it off, most speakers other than high-quality horns will crap out (or blow out) long before then. Very few amps produce a kilowatt of power, and those that do aren't real good at doing a milliwatt. That's a 1,000,000:1 power ratio - or a milliwatt to a kilowatt of power, to produce normal program levels. SNR means very, very little to good sound.Д¦0dB is a reasonable power range for truly high-fidelity audio. '100dB SNR' is a number they toss out because it's something that the unit can benchmarket quite well.