[LAU] Intel-HDA sound issues

[Jacob Lee]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Susan Cragin <susancragin at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Anyone have any luck with an m-audio transit?

Yes and no. It works fine and has great sound quality, but there are a
few caveats:
- it needs custom firmware. You need "madfuload", which comes with
many distros (or its homepage is http://usb-midi-fw.sourceforge.net/
). Getting madfuload to run automatically (i.e. when you plug in the
card) is occasionally challenging.
- the built-in mic preamp doesn't provide much gain. I needed to use
an external preamp.
- one tiny 1/8'' connector for two input channels; you'll need
adapters to turn that into two 1/4'' (unbalanced) line ins, and I
occasionally get loud static by accidentally jostling the adapter.

Last: even at mediocre latency settings (e.g. -n 3 -p 512), and having
adjusted the IRQ priorities and so forth, I get occasional xruns.
However, I think this is a problem with my laptop and not with the
sound card, for two reasons:
- I had no better luck with another usb sound card
- I see xruns when the lcd tries to dim itself or when I go into the
power savings dialog, leading me to suspect the video card.
So right now I'm inclined to blame the video card hogging the bus or
something like that, though I honestly have no clue. But it's probably
not the fault of the Transit.

In sum, it's a decent card for the price, if it's sufficient for your uses.

-- 
Jacob Lee
artdent at gmail.com