18 Feb
2004
18 Feb
'04
5:40 a.m.
Steve,
Steve Harris wrote:
As Frank pointed out most USB devices will /work/, I
said "avoid USB if
you can" because theres not much point using USB if you have PCI slots
free.
It's true that many PCI soundcards have better capabilities than their
USB counterparts. And at certain levels (multichannel in particular),
the throughput exceeds USB 1.0 and you would need a USB 2.0 high-speed
USB sound device to match that.
However, besides the obvious portability advantage of USB devices, there
is one other interesting feature of USB audio, which is to isolate the
A/D and D/A converters outside the generally noisy computer case, and
this can provide higher audio quality than an internal PCI device. But
only the higher-end USB devices would really have that advantage. I have
used some low-end ones that were just as noisy as the first ISA
Soundblaster 1.0 (Edirol UA-1A if you must know).