22 Oct
2002
22 Oct
'02
8:04 p.m.
On Tuesday 22 Oct 2002 22:07, Kai Vehmanen wrote:
Kai,
Many thanks for the reply.
On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Peter L Jones wrote:
Heh. Now, one of these I have in my machine ((PII vintage) Celeron 400)
already. The other would set me back £150. Your comment makes me think
there's little to choose between them. So, simply upgrading my soundcard
from a £15 low end consumer-oriented unit to something costing 10 times the
price looks like getting me nothing. Or am I missing something? :-(
I don't want to have to learn about DSPs and
stuff to be able to identify
a _good_ sound card. I've currently got a shortlist for my next machine:
* MidiMan Delta Audiophile 2496 (Envy24)
* Creative SB PCI 128 (ES1371)
I've used both of these extensively with JACK and numerous other ALSA apps
and they work really well (full-duplex, low-latency use). Other
soundcards/chipsets that I've used:
- snd-intel8x0 (nice chipset, is suitable for
low-latency use)
- snd-cs4281 (good for low-latency although has a max two-interrupts
per buffer limitation which can confuse apps)
- GUS MAX (this very, very old ISA-card can still beat a number of
today's crappy chipsets... I don't know whether to cry or laugh ;))
I noticed that the ENS1371 seems to have a better rating on one site I looked
than to EMU10K, so this doesn't surprise me!
Cards that I have no personal experience with, but I've heard very
good things about:
- RME Digi9652
Beware:
- SB AWE models (ugh, crap!)
- Yamaha YMF7xx/DS-XG (some have reported that these work ok,
but in any case they have a max 3 periods limitation
similar to cs4281, which can confuse apps)
All in all, most of the PCI-cards supported by ALSA have fairly good
drivers.
But how do I compare one card with another? What should I be looking for?
How can I tell which will reduce the load on my computer and which will
increase the load? Is there any difference?