Sound card?

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:22:07 -0600) it happened krw wrote in :

It would help if you told us what problems, and what you want to do with that sound card. I have 2 Creative soundcards in this PC, the cheapest one is the best one. Problems? What problems? It all works...

What didn't work? Running a Hifi grade sound card inside a fast PC environment is a bit of a challenge so you might not get perfect results but severe problems? How severe ? What sort(s) of problems?

All the ones I have ever had worked out of the box and behaved OK. Some were better than others for crosstalk and noise floor but they are minor niggles.

Regards, Martin Brown

In article , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com says...>

It's used in a audio test fixture

to set up a hybrid circuit. The internal sound card has sort of 5MHz oscillations that feed through the audio circuits (still don't understand it completely) and screw up the distortion measurements, though the sweep is clean. The SoundBlaster external has about

20dB of amplitude modulation on its outputs when the software is sweeping. The inputs see the same sort of thing but not even in phase so I can't just divide the two. The Turtle Beach unit has horrible distortion (they dodn't even specify the codec - wouldn't be surprised if it were only 8 bit).

What kind of problems? Why are they not acceptable? What do you want to do with the sound card? (compose/create music, play games, what?)

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:46:34 -0600) it happened krw wrote in :

Here is a linear sweep: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/sweep.wav

Wait if you here nothing, it starts at a very low frequency. And keep your volume down :-)

Maybe the filter, sometimes those sound cards need just the right driver. Or pickup from other PC hardware.

Tone control? Special audio button for 'spatial' on?

codec? In essence in the simple cards all you need is an ADC and lowpass filter. That would be a 16 bit ADC chip if you are lucky.

This is what I have, excerpt from typing 'lspci' in Linux:

0000:00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02) 0000:00:0c.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 0a) The Ensoniq is much better, cheaper, then the SB EMU10, because the EMU10 resamples everything to 48kHz, it has audible distortion. The Ensoniq is just a couple of ADCs... I always use that for quality audio.

As to 'codec', I use 'lame' to encode to mp3, mpg123 to play mp3, Linux transcode to transcode video, ffmpeg to transcode video to H264, mplayer and xine to play.

I would not be able to tell you what to use in MS windows, as the last MS OS I bought was win 98...

So, I encoded my 'sweep.wav' to mp3 with lame, you can compare how that sounds with your decoder part of your 'codec' here too: ftp:/panteltje.com/pub/sweep.wav.mp3 Seems flat here :-)

We use these as D to A converters for vector graphics down to DC.

EBAY item # 160284015210

No problems so far, and we actually SEE any errors.

A very rare "pop" if you have too many processes running on the control CPU, but thats it.

We modify them for DC coupling, bypass the caps and add a op-amp for offset.

I have not seen any HF hash on a 100 mhz scope.

Steve

5MHz noise can be muffled with LC filters and ferrite beads (lots of them). If it rides on the grounds or, worse, comes from the PC power supply then even a perfect sound card won't work out of the box. In that case you need good audio isolation transformers. The higher end stuff would be found at companies like this:

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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In article , snipped-for-privacy@uakron.edu says...>

Ordered (BiN). For $23 it's worth it just as a test, out of my pocket.

A pop wouldn't bother me. I can still make the measurements.

Don't need DC coupling, but that's good to know. If this works maybe I'll buy a pile of 'em. ;-)

That was only one of the problems, but a biggie.

Thanks for the pointer. I'll let you know how it goes.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com says...>

I'll give it a try, but I seen no problems when I use Audacity to generate tones. Even when I use the tool's built in signal generator there aren't any problems until I do a sweep. Then the modulation is obvious (20dB at 1HZ is kinda hard to miss). There is something else going on but I havent' been able to finger it.

What?

It's in the inputs, as well. In fact it's everywhere.

Can't find any such controls in the SB package. I did shut all that stuff off in the TB control panel.

The SB external claims a 24 bit DAC, though I have no idea what good a 24 bit DAC is with a S/N ratio of less than 90dB. TB claims nothing.

0a)

resamples

Can't do Linux.

LAME is used by Audacity, which we use for just about everything.

20dB of amplitude modulation on top of the audio would be hard to miss. ;-) I'll give it a try, but the software needs to drive the signal as well as receive it.

[...]

Unlikely caused by the sound card. It's probably the PC itself and then you need audio isolation transformers.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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:

The sound card's line-out is isolated, as is the output I'm monitoring with a scope. The sound card's line-in is more of a problem since I need reasonably accurate levels.

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:26:57 -0600) it happened krw wrote in :

Well, Linux is fun for me. For audio I think I wrote now almost all applications myself, some screenshots: frontend for various payers: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/xmpl.gif voice control and timed play: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/xpvox.gif equaliser, scope, AGC: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/xpequ.gif cmix the audio mixer, multimux to make 8 or more channel audio files, all available for download for free form my site, some here:

and a lot of other stuff too.

It goes like this: I tried audacity, needed some function it is supposed to have, it would not install, so that took too much of my time, in the same time I write my own.. Many audio applications are hyped beyond believe so they sell. I like to write small tools that at least do what they are supposed to do. xpequ can even be controlled via the internet remotely. And the DVD stuff did not even exist in Linux when I wrote it, neither did multimux (and still I see downloads for it almost everyday).

Yes 20dB is a lot, you need a good level meter, my apps have one.

I like utilises that can be used from the command line and in a script. For example the youtube videos are just scripted, all I need to supply it with, is the camera input, all conversions in video and audio are then automatically done. I keep lots of backups of these scripts... they are valuable. It means you only have to sort out things once. Does that MS OS have scripts these days?

Even selecting a TV station and watching TV is scripted here, including voice control. Just say: 'show ITV'.... and it will pop up full screen. Scripting is important, as I even forget how to use the programs I wrote myself. There are simply too many of those..

So that was little commercial :-)

:

Line-in is most critical. At our church it was so bad that we decided to buy a high-end MP3 recorder. Anyhow, your best bet might be to still use an audio iso transformer there and then calibrate that out of the equation. If needed you could run a battery operated amp before that or feed it with isolated (chopped) power.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Use a virtual engine then. That's how I run Ubuntu.

Its file system ain't my cup of tea.

have,

write my own..

But some SW audio gadgets are amazing. This PC here came with a rich audio massaging package from Realtek that I didn't even know of (was not advertized at all) until I listened to a Bluegrass station and wanted to adjust the speakers. Out popped a luxurious equalizer and all kind of sound effects. You could make the bands sound as if they were in a concert hall. Amazing.

Don't know about Windows but DOS can, and that runs quite well on an XP, Win2k or NT machine.

control.

myself.

But stop watching so much TV, it'll fry your brain ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:26:04 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Oh yes, I remember .bat files. I was sooooo happy when I moved from DrDOS 6 to Linux, infinitely more powerful. No I will never run DOS again. And, I gave up on 'virtualisers' too, many things do not work, it slows everything down, and why would I want MS DOS or MS Windows next to Linux to slow it down ;-)? Virtualisers is just hype, only makes sense if you are renting out servers.

Have not watched TV for several day, have 3 movies recorded on harddisk:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3389626088 2009-01-15 02:45 tremors.ts

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2288725536 2009-01-23 16:00 the_undefeated_john_wayne.ts

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3434167048 2009-01-25 02:20 license_to_kill.ts Have not had time to watch the John Wayne one, 'tremors' is fun, about big worms.. That Bond movie I did not have yet, seen a second time it is not bad at all. Look at the times, movie 1 and 3 recorded automagically at night from satellite. think it was ITV4 and BBC, and number 2 from Ch4. And very good quality too. All recorded with xdipo: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/xdipo2.jpg that I wrote myself too of course :-) Maybe about time to sell a DVD with Panteltje-Linux. Only thing I have never written is a web browser, I started on it as a feature in this news reader:

(NewsFleX), because I wanted to be able to read off-line (phone line was expensive in those days), but found out that html was a moving target, and that writing a web browser was a life long job, and things like cache programs such as wwwoffle already started doing the off line thing better, so I stopped that.

It pretty much always has, it just wasn't too horribly powerful (relative to, e.g., the Bourne shell) until lately.

:

one.

It seems that most of the typical PCI or on board sound systems pick up alot of buss noise in their analog circuits. I've succesfully modified a few cards to clean up the power but at best they typically run about 70db below full scale. Then there is the issue of unbalanced in/out. There are cards made for the professional recording market such as M audio / Delta. I've not had the opportunity to try one, but I would suggest you go to one of the newsgroups like rec audio pro and ask there. bg

Auzentech

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

:

I'll try transformers on Line-in, but it's ugly. I'd have thought I'd see the problem with all three sound cards and worse with the internal sound card if it was an isolation problem.