[LAU] six channel output sound card recommendation

[david]

Arnold Krille wrote:
> Am Freitag, 3. Oktober 2008 schrieb david:
>> Arnold Krille wrote:
>>> Why not use the average built-in soundcard in surround mode? That gives
>>> yousix channels (with non-pro quality) at no extra costs...
>> Hmm, haven't met a built-in sound card with that many channels, but I'm
>> a bottom feeder when it comes to computer equipment.
> 
> Must be pretty old hardware you have.

Probably so. The server runs a Sempron 3000+. The onboard sound (which 
I've never used) has only 3 jacks on it. IIRC, one is Mic In, one is 
Line Out, one is an amplified output signal. The server has an AOpen 
AW320 PCI sound card (Crystal Audio chipset) in it, but ALSA apparently 
can't find it or can't drive it when it does find it ... The AW320 has 5 
connectors on it, I think ...

> Since quite some years now the on-board 
> sound of motherboards and laptops has 3 jacks which are either line-out, 
> line-in and mic-in or front, rear, sub+center. And don't panic, the sub is a 
> normal line-out without any lowpass or similar applied...

My Toshiba laptop (bought in 2004, so I guess it's old now, too) has Mic 
In and Headphone out.

> Just start jackd without any -i or -o and see how many channels you get :-)

Well, QJackCtl shows me two readable ports (capture_1, capture_2) and 
two writable ports (playback_1, playback_2). But there are only two 
physical audio ports on the machine - sound goes out one and not out the 
other - so I guess JACK is seeing the left/right sides of each one? 
Anyway, to date, I can't tell if sound fed into the microphone port 
actually gets anywhere - attempting to record anything fails, some silly 
artifact of using Intel 8x0 chipsets, I'm told.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community