Well I think
that there is absolutly no border between
"Professional" Audio and "Non-Professional" Audio.
See some previous posts.
I also dislike the idea of dividing the users to pros and
amateurs. Am I a pro? Certainly not, I'm just a hobbyist. And
I'd be glad if some day I could install any distro, plug in
my guitar, fire up jack-rack and start jammin.
We all agree that an AC '97 chip is not the best solution to
do so, but as soon as its successor HDA will spread (which
works at 48000kHz per default), things could change.
Even pros tend to buy cheap hardware, and the difference
between consumer and pro cards will decrease. Look at me and
Frank Barknecht. We're both using a relatively cheap consumer
USB card on out notebooks.
And furthermore: Even if JACK would be the standard on every
desktop distro, this does not prevent a pro user to
reconfigure the system and run JACK on an other card.
It remembers me the days as softmodems haven't been supported
well by linux: "Buy a real modem, softmodem suck because
these eat you CPU power". Sorry, but on a desktop machine
it's a cool idea to have cheap hardware and let the CPU do as
much as possible, because your CPU is bored during you're
reading webpages.
Therefore, I have no problem running JACK as a default
soundserver even if it eats some of my CPU power and to use a
cheap card as long as the sound from my speakers doesn't
sound crappy.
Even when running JACK on top of my AC '97 onboard chip,
plugging in my guitar and using some LADSPAs in jack-rack, it
sounds much better than my digitech studio quad I still have
in my rack and was about 450EUR 7 years ago.
[...]
As was already pointed out, prosumer and professional
users
will in all probably have two different audio cards anyway.
At least for the hobbyist (and I can speak for them):
disagreed :) .
Best regards
ce
