[linux-audio-user] A nice PCI audio card for the PC?

[Malcolm Baldridge]

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 have modest requirements:

1) Stereo in/out's fine, but multi-channel output is a pure bonus.

2) It should be as clean as practical - I realise outboard DAC/ADC is the 
way to go if the godliness of Clean is sought, but I don't need better than 
a -93dB noise floor.

3) It should have reprogrammable bitclocks so that resampling is not 
necessary at any bitrate of sampling OR playback.  Creative Labs seems to 
have gone the way of fixed-rates and overrelies on DSP hardware to "patch 
up" support for various user configurable bitrates.  96KHz support would be 
awesome, but 48K wouldn't be a problem.  Likewise, with sample sizes, 16's 
all I need, but 20 or 24 would be awesome.

4) Intelligent and flexible audio-routing [monitoring would be nice, but 
isn't required] so that I don't have minefields of which channels are 
shadowed to which channels when recording from LINE OUT.  I ran into so 
real minefields with some motherboard chipsets where it was quite difficult 
to record LINE IN audio without having LINE OUT audio mixed in with it.

5) Rich and excellent ALSA support, of course.

6) It should be a well-performing card with good bus-mastering DMA support 
so driving it doesn't take too many CPU cycles.
I've seen Turtle Beach hardware on sale for reasonable prices, and a 
generally positive writeup on these in various ALSA groups.  How are they 
for audio quality and performance?

7) Under US$200 price tag.  Preferably under US$100.

Am I asking for something that exists?  Thanks for your patience.

=MB=

PS: My negative bias against Creative Labs is not cast in stone - if my 
impressions or perceptions are mistaken, I'm happy to correct them.

PPS: The Hammerfall cards look *AWESOME*, however I sense they are way over 
my price range.

-- 
A focus on Quality.