Sound card questions...

[MkIII_Supra]

So my sound card is starting to die finally... I have only been using it since 1999... anyhow I want to upgrade to a much nicer sound card, one that I can crank up since I have 99% of my music on my PC now. I have a couple I am looking for but would like to ask the folks here if they are using them and what they think before I plunk a chunk o' change down on a new card.

First up:

Turtle Beach Montego 7.1 Dolby Digital Live Surround PCI Sound Card

Next
Diamond Xtreme XS71DDL Dolby Digital Sound Card

And finally
Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1/24 bit Sound Card

Inputs?

[i845_]

I do not see any of the cards you mentioned in your post in the ALSA compatibility lists... (Diamond Multimedia (http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Diamond_Multimedia), Turtle Beach (http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Turtle_Beach)). The compatiliblity list for Turtle Beach does include a few cards under the "Montego" name, but none of them provides 7.1 outputs. So we can safely assume that these aren't what you're looking for.

Asus makes some pretty good cards under the Xonar line. You might want to take a gander at those. You might also want to look for external "audio interfaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_card#Professional_soundcards_.28audio_interf aces.29)". They say these are better than internal soundcards in that they're less susceptible to EMI/RFI.

Personally, I'd go for a Asus Xonar D1 (http://www.asus.com/Product.aspx?P_ID=6p3ZFmkwzIKPTYLk)[/URL] (supported on Linux by [URL="http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus"]ALSA (http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=2443&l1=25&l2=144&l3=0&l4=0)), or an Echo AudioFire 2 (http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/FireWire/AudioFire2/specs.php) (supported on Linux by FFADO (http://www.ffado.org/?q=node/68)).

[bwkaz]

- Anything with a hardware mixer is good.

- Anything without a hardware mixer is probably going to cause problems, sooner or later. Mucking around with all the software mixing hacks is a crapshoot at best. dmix isn't horrible (...usually), as long as you don't mind a small bit of latency in certain cases, though you can tweak it to make that better as well.

(But with a hardware mixer, you can uninstall (or at least disable) all your distro pulseaudio/esd/arts/dmix, etc. hacks. :p)

Of course, the problem with this is that you can't tell what cards have hardware mixers on them anymore (the manufacturers don't tell you), and most don't. :(

I know the older SB Live cards did (emu10k1). I know my $20 Yamaha did (ymfpci). I don't know about anything else. I strongly suspect any of these surround sound monstrosities will be software mixing...