Soundcard

[D-Dan]

I currently have a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card in my Vista 64 rig, with Altec Lansing 5.1 speakers plugged into it. Overall, I'm happy with the quality, but I'm less happy that Creative simply won't (or can't) write fully featured drivers for Vista 64. So I'm looking for an inexpensive alternative (let's face it - the X-Fi was hardly wallet busting), and after a bit of browsing, I'm liking the look of this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-Xonar-DS-71-PCI-Soundcard-192k-24bit-true-PC-Hi-Fi-audio-presentation

Does anyone have any experience of this card and how it compares with the Creative for quality? Searching the web doesn't turn up too much useful info.

Steve

[Rik]

Not me, Steve, sorry.

[Simon]

Me neither. 

[Sebby]

Erm...

[Ann]

I use the sound on the motherboard myself.  I'd think at that price that the mobo sound is as good if not better.

[Gary]

I currently have a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card in my Vista 64 rig, with Altec Lansing 5.1 speakers plugged into it. Overall, I'm happy with the quality, but I'm less happy that Creative simply won't (or can't) write fully featured drivers for Vista 64. So I'm looking for an inexpensive alternative (let's face it - the X-Fi was hardly wallet busting), and after a bit of browsing, I'm liking the look of this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-Xonar-DS-71-PCI-Soundcard-192k-24bit-true-PC-Hi-Fi-audio-presentation

Does anyone have any experience of this card and how it compares with the Creative for quality? Searching the web doesn't turn up too much useful info.

Steve

I had a creative soundcard in my alienware rig and it had fully compatible x64 drivers, what features are you missing?

[D-Dan]

The main one is the "What U Hear" recording source, which I occasionally use to grab samples from live streams, but then I figure if that's missing, what else is?

Steve

[Niall]

I'd look into the hardware on any soundcard if I were you. The last time I was looking into this (for the same reasons) I discovered that all the soundcards out there that weren't Creative, actually used the same Creative chipset so had the same problems.

[Fox]

I dont know if this card is more than you want to spend but it is a superb card and gets very good reviews.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-000-AS&groupid=701&catid=11&subcat=

It is fully vista compatable and doesnt use the creative chipset, unlike the Auzentech cards. ASUS also do a version of the card that uses a PCI express x1 slot too.

[D-Dan]

That last looks like the bigger brother of the one I was looking at. Chipset on the DS:

Main Chipset
Audio Processor:
ASUS AV200 High-Performance Sound Processor (Max. 192KHz/24bit)
24-bit D-A Converter of Digital Sources:
Wolfson WM8776* 1 (108dB SNR, Max. 192kHz/24bit) / Wolfson WM8766*1 (103dB SNR, Max. 192kHz/24bit)
24-bit A-D Converter for Analog Inputs:
Wolfson WM8776* 1 (102dB SNR, Max. 96kHz/24bit)

Which is definitely not Creative's work.

[Niall]

I'm tempted to get one of those myself on next payday. I use my speakers through my laptop, but if I had that maybe I'd have full 7.1 surround sound again 

[D-Dan]

Well - I changed my mind - and not because of my intentions. I uninstalled the creative card and re-enabled the on board sound, installed the drivers (Realtek HD) and still no "What U Hear" driver.

Now - I hear that Vista DRM is something to do with this, but since Ubuntu went tits up on PC2 I threw Vista on there. Exactly the same issue.

So now I have 28 days to decide whether I buy a new Vista license, or re-install Ubuntu from scratch. If I can hack the extended activation period, Ubuntu 9.10 should be out in time

Steve

[Ted]

So now I have 28 days to decide whether I buy a new Vista license, or re-install Ubuntu from scratch.

That decision would take me considerably less than 28 nanoseconds. 

[Dangerjunkie]

Hi Dan,

What problem are you experiencing with Ubuntu 9.04 and what is the hardware? I've found 9.04 to be really solid. Beats 8.10 soundly on everything I've tried to run it on.

On the subject of sound cards. I use a Tapco LinkUSB external audio interface for all my high quality stuff. It's really good and when I got mine Absolute Music in Poole were doing them for a silly price (£70 down from £199)

Cheers,
Paul.

[D-Dan]

Hi Dan,

What problem are you experiencing with Ubuntu 9.04 and what is the hardware? I've found 9.04 to be really solid. Beats 8.10 soundly on everything I've tried to run it on.

TBH - I can't be sure. After working solidly since April on two machines (my main one that dual boots Vista, and PC2 as the exclusive OS) it started falling over on PC2 as X loads. I fixed it on PC2 by doing some careful tweaking of the graphics configuration, and finally got it to boot again, but only with the vesa driver. A week later it started failing on PC1 at the same stage.

On PC1 I think it's more critical, since no amount of playing with the graphics will fix it, and even the vesa drivers leave me with a black screen.

Now I know ATI and Linux haven't played nicely together in the past, though I've heard very good things about the 9.8 drivers and was going to install them. The problem is, they don't exist for PC2 (RX1950GT), and I can't boot far enough to try on PC1 (HD4670). Rather than go for the reinstall now, with Ubuntu 9.10 less than 2 months away, I'm tempted to wait until then. (I still have to do a lot of reminding when configuring a fresh install of Linux to make it play nice with the network, regardless of the OS on PC1, and I still need to setup a VM on PC2 to run XP so that I can get Sam broadcaster working - the only Windows program that doesn't play nicely with WINE).

Steve