Time to do this all over, again ... Hi-Fi sound card

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I've had several from Creative in the past, gamer styles as well, and finally landed home with M-Audio 2496 for pure listening when I was using Windows XP Pro.

Now a new computer and it doesn't seem to like the M-Audio PCI based sound card (crashes every few hours) drivers. "Updating" the drivers does not seem to affect the results, yet.

I have a fairly decent "new computer" running Windows 7 Home Premium. I use both Foobar and Winamp, EAC, FLAC, WMP (for vids). I don't do any gaming nor am I interested in surround sound (I have a separate system for movies). I just want the "best" two channel sound card that I can reasonably afford.


What is in the upper quality range of Win 7 friendly cards out there? I don't need any recording functions - I just want high quality playback in stereo.
 
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I have had a maya44 pci soundcard but I could not get this card work in combination with Atom N270 motherboards (945GSE chipset). Got Blue screens or windows operating system (XP/WIN7) did not start. The card itself was ok, it works properly in another computer. The drivers of semi professional soundcards are often crap, what I had to learn and spent a lot time and money for this lessons.

After the Maya44 I tried also an M-Audio 192 soundcard. Every 20 to 30 seconds I got pops in digital outpout when having sample rates > 44.1 kHz. Regardless which asio buffer sizes or PCI settings were used.
Also 176.4 kHz digital output did not work with the M-Audio. The M-Audio resamples to 88.2 kHz. Dont know if it resamples in general or it was caused by a special configuration of my system.

Finally I bought a used professional soundcard (RME Hammerfall DSP 9632) at ebay. Perfect soundcard in my opinion. The bulid quality is excellent. Processor load during playback is very low (around 1-2%), no trouble with drivers and works with windows 7. It also support AES/EBU so I can use the S/PDIF and Toslink inputs of my Apogee DAC for other source devices. I did not test analog out of the soundcard, but I expect it will be very good also.

Arne
 
M-Audio 192 uses regular internal clock circuits of Envy24HT. This part of the chip has a bug, causing it to run at 88.2kHz instead of 176.4kHz. The driver can do nothing about it. Therefore, later cards using this chip (ESI Juli, Infrasonic Quartet) have external clock circuits, avoiding the clock-generation part of the chip and allowing proper 176.4kHz output.
 
check out the lynx cards, I can also recommend the RME9632 if you can do a little DIY you can mod it to sound even better. with a simple HD15 cable you can pull balanced output from it (the official cable is a bit pricey) and it will also turn your PC into a very nice transport with AES output if you wish to move further. (i'm doing this feeding a sabre dac) the best thing about this baby is the drivers are totally rock solid, I havent had a single driver related crash in the 4 years of owning mine. the M-Ausio is left in the dust by either card. I had a delta66 before the RME and it sounds downright bad by comparison.
 
Onkyo Wavio boards

Onkyo Wavio 24/196 SE200PCI

check out the specs.

fabulous card. i own five.

can only get them in japan or thru like audiocubes, or geekstuff

manuals are a little tuff, being in japanese and all but, hey, get 'em if ya can. they are smashing. they run the nVidia envy drivers... available at your local 7-11

regards,
Tom
 
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Onkyo Wavio 24/196 SE200PCI

check out the specs.

fabulous card. i own five.

can only get them in japan or thru like audiocubes, or geekstuff

manuals are a little tuff, being in japanese and all but, hey, get 'em if ya can. they are smashing. they run the nVidia envy drivers... available at your local 7-11

regards,
Tom

I owned a SE200 too. I would not call it a fabulous soundcard because of its Vector linear shaping circuity (VLSC). This is fine to enhance MP3 recordings but will make good recordings worse. Connect a Spectrum analyzer and you know what I mean. The S/N and THD specs. in their datasheet are not what you get at the output. For me it is sounding card not a soundcard.
 
The VLSC is part of the 3 OPA output buffer circuit. It makes a sqare wave looking like a sine wave shape by adding a huge amount of harmonics.

TECHNOLOGY | ONKYO Asia and Oceania Website


How can adding harmonics turn square wave to sine shape? I can imagine that by removing harmonics which is what proper fs/2 output filter is supposed to do. I know nothing about VLSC, do not have the card physically, but I assumed it has a regular analog output filter.
 
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Flatlander,

Why not a different approach? I have a wireless music bridge (Linksys WMB54G) and an external DAC. The Linksys, the C-Media Wi-Sonic and the Sondigo Sirocco Wireless Audio Bridge are the same product in a different package, you can find these cheap off ebay. They work with a LAN of WiFi connection.
They're upsampling it seems (A new wireless source: Linksys WMB54G - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio) but still, I love the sound very much. You can stream whatever audio from your PC (or any other computer that has the appropriate software installed) to the bridge and use the PC's volume control.

Or you look for a soundcard with an optical digital output and use an external DAC (there are nice DACs with the PCM1793 on ebay). No groudloops, no hum, no cables or wires across the room.

Edit: typo
 
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How can adding harmonics turn square wave to sine shape? I can imagine that by removing harmonics which is what proper fs/2 output filter is supposed to do. I know nothing about VLSC, do not have the card physically, but I assumed it has a regular analog output filter.

Have a look here. It is in chinese language but you can see in the picture at the middle of the page where the VLSCircuitry is located on the soundcard.

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Details of the patent mentioned on the japanese page

Google Translation

are here:

Search Result

It is some kind of a low pass filter.

Perhaps it is a low pass filter too, but the circuit causes a lot of harmonics. I had this card several month. You can hear the VLSC effect and harmonics, you can measure it. After you have measured it you wont listen to the card anymore. It does not make sense spent so much money for a soundcard which degrades the sound. Pioneer had a technology a few years ago named Legato Link to create harmonic contenct for enhancing the CD spectrum. Some like it. I like it not, because in most situations it make the sound worse.
Had have such a player with Legato Link a few years ago.
 
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