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USB sound card choice?
james_s:
I've had a handful of occasions where I've wanted to digitize an audio signal, say from a vinyl record, reel to reel tape or other source and unfortunately portability is needed here and the laptops I have are severely lacking in terms of audio input, most having just a mono mic port. I'm looking for a decent USB sound card that has a proper line input. When I say "decent" I don't mean exotic woo-woo high end audiophool gear, I just mean something equivalent to a midrange PCI sound card in a desktop PC, a step up from the $2 generic Chinese things. Price range ideally <$50 but I'd consider going a bit higher for something that offered compelling advantages. Standard RC jacks for input would be ideal but phone jacks are acceptable too. Support in Linux is a requirement, Windows 7 x64 support nice to have too. Suggestions for a specific product to look for are welcome, either new or used is fine provided it's reasonably easy to find one.
NiHaoMike:
Behringer makes some pretty good USB audio interfaces, but I'm pretty sure all the cheaper ones can only do 16 bit/48kHz.
ve7xen:
The standard recommendation for a 'cheap but decent' USB sound card is the Behringer UCA202 or the nearly identical UFO202 and UCA222. It's only 16bit/48khz, but the analog performance is reasonable, and it's only $20 or on sale right now for $10 at Sweetwater. It's a UAC1 device, so works on pretty much anything with a USB host port. However word on the street is they've switched to a clone of the original TI all-in-one chip, and that performance is worse than before on the new units, though likely performance is still reasonable for casual use. YMMV, but for $10 I think it'd be hard to go wrong, though performance won't be incredible either way.
The next step up is a pretty big one to the Behringer UMC202HD (you will need 2 RCA -> 1/4" TRS cables) for about $80, with 24/192 and significantly better analog. Also bigger, more complicated, and with controls you probably don't need/want, but I'm not really aware of anything cheaper that offers good audio quality.
james_s:
Isn't 16 bit/48kHz essentially CD quality? Like I said, I don't need audiophool grade stuff, I just want something roughly equivalent to a PCI sound card in a desktop PC. I'm not up to date on bitrates and such in digital audio.
mansaxel:
16 bits at 48KHz is equivalent but not the same as CD.
CD has 44.1 KHz sample frequency. I don't think there's a noticeable difference in this case.
48KHz is more common in pro gear, and if I'm not aiming at actual CD production, but only want to make bit-reduced files like Ogg or FLAC (or the more copyrighted ones like MP3) that's what I'd use. Sound files can be sample rate converted, with only minimal loss, so no big issue.
The UCA202 can to both 44.1 and 48 (and 32KHz, should you want it, which you don't). A bit uncertain how sample rate is selected unless you have some publicised programming interface for such in the "standard USB audio" class.
The only thing I'm a bit concerned over is the bit depth, but as long as you get your gain structure right on the analog side (analog 0 dBm = -18dBFS in the digital domain is a good start) the 96dB range of 16 bits is probably OK.
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