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USB sound card choice?

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rsjsouza:
Creative labs had some USB adapters that were quite decent, even with phono inputs. I think this one was named Sound Blaster XFi HD.

Since you are in the US, it would be easy to find it on the used market.

ve7xen:

--- Quote from: james_s on December 10, 2021, 09:04:56 am ---Well I suppose I could just drag my desktop PC into the other room and use that, I don't know if the onboard sound is any better than a $20 device but it has a separate line-in jack at least. I'd be encoding mp3, probably 128kbps, maybe 160 in some cases, this is not pristine high end media I want to archive, it's just some random old stuff that I want to preserve. It's strange that the inexpensive USB solutions are apparently not as capable as the desktop sound cards, I think the last time I bought a PCI sound card it was not even $50 but that was a long time ago. It's odd that there doesn't seem to be much between $20 and expensive pro gear.

--- End quote ---

I think there's just not much market for sound cards of any sort any more. The average user will be using Bluetooth peripherals, or gizmos with their own built-in DAC/ADC (e.g. 'USB turntables'), so that really just leaves pro/semi-pro gear.

Feature wise, such simple USB cards aren't going to offer anything on top of an integrated sound card, but they will probably sound better. Very implementation dependent as the integrated DACs/ADCs themselves aren't terrible, but it's not free to implement audio well on a densely packed motherboard. So they tend to be quite noisy at best.

David Hess:
I was considering Focusrite and I think a Behringer UMC202HD, which supports 24 bit at 192 kS/s, not long ago for an application like this, but the mentioned Bahringer less expensive UFO202 and similar look ideal.  I still have not forgiven Creative Labs for the Soundblaster Live; they cannot be trusted.

When I did this many many years ago, I used a Turtle Beach PCI sound card (16 bit at 48 kS/s) to record from Dolby HX C metal tapes and encoded to Lame 256 kb/s MP3 after using Sound Forge to remove background noise.  The results were excellent.

David Hess:

--- Quote from: ve7xen on December 10, 2021, 06:23:16 pm ---I think there's just not much market for sound cards of any sort any more. The average user will be using Bluetooth peripherals, or gizmos with their own built-in DAC/ADC (e.g. 'USB turntables'), so that really just leaves pro/semi-pro gear.
--- End quote ---

My current external audio amplifier has an auxiliary Bluetooth input and I consider it useless for video or gaming where low latency is required.  It also occasionally skips.  In theory Bluetooth supports low latency, but based on experience now, I think getting it to work that way is a futile.  I could add an optical DAC to break the ground loop but as it is, the analog sound outputs from my motherboard have no discernible noise or distortion.


--- Quote ---Feature wise, such simple USB cards aren't going to offer anything on top of an integrated sound card, but they will probably sound better. Very implementation dependent as the integrated DACs/ADCs themselves aren't terrible, but it's not free to implement audio well on a densely packed motherboard. So they tend to be quite noisy at best.
--- End quote ---

In many cases the sound card integrated into a PC motherboard will work fine for an application like this, but I would be less sanguine about a laptop and offhand I don't know of any laptops which have line level inputs.  I would have loved a good and cheap USB audio interface 25 years ago for a laptop.

You can read about various design compromises in the Focusrite and Behringer USB audio interfaces in some forums but they are irrelevant in all but the most exacting applications.

mansaxel:

--- Quote from: David Hess on December 10, 2021, 07:07:45 pm ---
My current external audio amplifier has an auxiliary Bluetooth input and I consider it useless for video or gaming where low latency is required.  It also occasionally skips.  In theory Bluetooth supports low latency, but based on experience now, I think getting it to work that way is a futile.  I could add an optical DAC to break the ground loop but as it is, the analog sound outputs from my motherboard have no discernible noise or distortion.

--- End quote ---

I just added a Chinesium BT dongle to my multiroom stereo set-up. It's quite nice. But one uses it for playing back music from services like Spotify et c. For low-latency audio, analog still is king. Simply because low-latency digital is quite complicated to do right, especially if one involves a non-real-time multi-purpose operating system. Then it's only a question of how much time you lose. Not whether.


--- Quote from: David Hess on December 10, 2021, 07:07:45 pm ---In many cases the sound card integrated into a PC motherboard will work fine for an application like this, but I would be less sanguine about a laptop and offhand I don't know of any laptops which have line level inputs.  I would have loved a good and cheap USB audio interface 25 years ago for a laptop.

You can read about various design compromises in the Focusrite and Behringer USB audio interfaces in some forums but they are irrelevant in all but the most exacting applications.

--- End quote ---

Indeed.

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