recent sound cards (available in India) which work on Debian wheezy
Hi,
Jonas Smedegaard suggested I write to this list. I hope this is Ok -
asking about hardware here is probably not exactly what this mailing list
is intended for, but I'm dealing with a slightly annoying problem.
[Warning: people reading this post are likely to experience extreme
boredom]
I'm in Bombay, India. The motherboard I used is the Asus Sabertooth 990fx
2.0. However, this card has a crappy Realtek onboard sound card, which is
causing me grief. In particular when I use the mike I get bad
interference, like crackling sounds.
Replacing this sound card, however, does not seem to be as easy as I would
have hoped. The sound cards available in India, which are mostly the newer
ones, seem to all have questionable or incomplete support in Linux (via
Alsa). Unfortunately, for the most part, the older sound cards which have
better sound support aren't available here. To complicate matters further,
the motherboard only has 1 PCI slot, which I am currently using with an
ethernet card, and unfortunately, all the older sound cards are PCI.
One of the things that makes shopping in India extra fun is that it is
basically impossible to return anything.
An example of the kind of card I mean is the Asus Xonar DG, which doesn't
do much more than playback - in particular the mike doesn't work.
Another one is the
Creative 5.1 vx PCI Internal Sound Card-
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Creative_Labs has
[PCI] Not all features on all models supported. On the VX, white noise on
playback unless initialized in Windows first. One quirky (but permanent)
workaround is to enable the old oss modules, specifically the 100% sound
blaster compatible module (sb). You don't have to load the oss modules.
The alsa module snd-ca0106 works fine somehow if the old sb module is
compiled in the kernel as a module (no white noise).
Ironically, even the old Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 would probably be fine. I
did find two sites in India which claim to sell this, but I wrote to ask
them what the model number was (to check it was the right thing) and they
didn't reply.
Another example is
http://ratetorate.in/products/Creative-Sound-Blaster-X%252dFI-Titanium-Sound-Card
The good news is that this is a PCI Express 1x card, but I'm not sure how
well it is supported, and Rs 6700 is getting slightly ridiculous for a
card. However, from information I have been able to glean from the net it
is the most likely to be supported of the 3 cards I have mentioned. I see
it is listed in https://wiki.debian.org/X-Fi. Can anyone comment on this
one? I've seen the odd negative post about this, e.g.
http://guh.me/solving-creative-sound-blaster-x-fi-titanium-crackling-slash-distortion-on-linux/
which was not reassuring.
Does anyone have any ideas? I'm even considered trying to get a card from
outside India, like having someone get from the US or somewhere, but is
there a good PCIe sound card that is well supported by Linux?
Thanks in advance.
Regards, Faheem Mitha
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