USB soundcard

[autek]

Before I splurge and buy one. What does the group think about it if will work or not. The sound on my A20M TP is lousy at best. These are the size of a flash drive and plug into a USB port......comments...??

Ed

[bluesdog]

I'd check it out first -- http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php?company=USB&card=Generic&chip=Generic&module=usb-audio

.. and make sure the vendor has a reasonable return policy if the thing won't work.

[benjaminq]

Before I splurge and buy one. What does the group think about it if will work or not. The sound on my A20M TP is lousy at best. These are the size of a flash drive and plug into a USB port......comments...??

Ed
I've bought a Terratec Aureon MKII USB. If you can deactivate the crappy onboard chip of your Laptop you can go straight forward with it.

Hm, I had to do the following in KDE: switch from arts to ALSA (also in kaffeine and amaroK) and define the external hardware device number as hw:2 in the KDE soundsettings (ymmv). Then it took me a little bit of brain to find out that it won't work at all when the soundcard sits on an external USB hub. After plugging it into the last available port on my laptop it worked.

Pro: the sound is really a magnitude better; now I can send the optical digital signal into my iCub/SibXL combo ... :-)
Contra: my ALSA does not perform software mixing, that means I have ONE program only that can deliver sounds and that blocks the soundserver; and KMix has to be set to the external device every time (if I could only deactivate the on-board sound chip in the BIOS).

BEnjamin

edit: the price here was 45 EUR which is reasonable I think.

[autek]

Thanks for the input, I'm not sure what to do now. If the card won't work via a hub I'm stuck. I only have 1 USB port. However Google produced quite a bit of info to sift through. I found a Linux compatable card from newegg for less than $25 USD.

Ed