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

[Them]

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