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Topic: USB sound card recommendations (Read 13409 times) previous topic - next topic
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USB sound card recommendations

Sorry for yet another topic, but I try to limit offtopic questions  I asked about an amp with SPDIF input, but then I learned that USB sound cards are rather more affordable, and, IMHO, they look much better next to a PC than a home theatre amp  So I might be in the market for such a card, but I need something that:

1. Sounds good, obviously.
2. Works under Linux (I'll check that myself if needed, but I'd prefer input from someone who actually has experience with that  )
3. Works well by itself, i.e. without an external DAC or amp.
4. Will be able to drive decent headphones. I'm almost certain I'll buy Sennheiser HD 595 'phones and my new card must be able to drive them 100%.

I don't need a lot of features like sound processing, mic input and so on (although the card can have them, of course). I just want to plug it into my PC, plug my headphones into it and enjoy the music

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #1 –
Here's another one searching for affordable USB-sound card. I just need a good sound card which is able to transfer a digital signal from my laptop (Powerbook G4) to my amplifier. I guess it's impossible to bypass the resampling effect (at least I couldn't find any USB-sound card that would support sampling rate of 44.1) but then again I guess the sound cards know how to do it properly, so there shouldn't be any audible differences.

I've surfed the internet and came across this little piece of M-Audio called Transit. Any experiences on that one? It seems very suitable for my needs...

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #2 –
I was looking for an external soundcard myself recently, and after researching products, with driver quality being among the top priorities (ruling out Creative, Terratec, ESI etc.) I settled on the Echo AudioFire2. As the name hints, this is a Firewire device, but it's a semi-professional device which means no resampling nonsense.

Being an amateur musician my priorities are probably slightly different, but it should satisfy people looking for a straight playback solution as well.

It has balanced analogue outputs, a digital output, and headphone outputs, and they're all seperately addressable (or combinable). So you could have foobar2000 play music on the analogue out, and have your game sounds routed to the headphones for example.

The drivers are top quality, frequently updated, non-bloated, and Vista x64 compatible.

It ain't too pricey either, and it's a small sturdy metal construction (and looks rather spiffy on my desk).

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #3 –
How about the Edirol UA1-EX?  It works in Ubuntu 8.04 without issue.  I plugged it into a USB port and it was recognized.  It works in 16bit and 24 bit (tried both via the dip switches on the device), but I don't know if the Linux driver recognizes the difference and actually outputs 24 bit sound.

The headphone out was decent enough (to my ears) with a Denon D5000 and a DT880, but I did not RMAA the headphone out.  Esanssi - It also has SPDIF in/out.

It's really a nice little device for the price.

I would avoid firewire devices if you are using Linux.

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #4 –
Quote from: odigg on
How about the Edirol UA1-EX?  It works in Ubuntu 8.04 without issue.  I plugged it into a USB port and it was recognized.  It works in 16bit and 24 bit (tried both via the dip switches on the device), but I don't know if the Linux driver recognizes the difference and actually outputs 24 bit sound.

The headphone out was decent enough (to my ears) with a Denon D5000 and a DT880, but I did not RMAA the headphone out.  Esanssi - It also has SPDIF in/out.

It's really a nice little device for the price.


Hey, this is more like it! It's only few bucks more expensive than Transit and it does not do resampling. Seems also compatible with Mac OS. A strong contestant for winning, thanks!

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #5 –
I have no FireWire anyway, so that's out of the question  And that Edirol model seems too basic - it doesn't even have a nice volume knob  The UA-4FX is better, but it's still powered via USB. Sennheiser 595s will supposedly work with almost any stereo hardware, but if I'm not 100% positive that this card can fully drive them, I won't buy it.
Right now, I'm looking at M-Audio Audiophile 2496 USB, as the PCI model has a rather positive opinion. It's quite ugly, unfortunately, but it's powered externally (9 V), so that's probably enough. Any other recommendations?

Oh, the E-MU is out of the question. I think it has problems under Linux, and in any case, its headphone amp has a bad reputation.

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #6 –
If you just want a basic sound card that can power headphones, why are you looking into professional solutions?  Why not go into audiophile hardware?

Total Bithead

http://www.headphone.com/products/headphon...tal-bithead.php

Headstage Lyrix

http://www.headphonia.com/Lyrix-Amp:::1001.html

Both can be powered off USB and both should be more than enough for your HD595.  Both were designed for headphone use and the design focus is there.

If you want to spend a little more how about the Fubar III? 24V AC powered and can probably drive any headphone.

http://www.miniatureaudio.com/fubar3.html

Or how Travagan's Green?  Should be able to drive any headphone with 24V AC power

http://shop.travagans.com/product.php?act=page&id=20

In both the Fubar III and Travagan's Green you can change the opamps if you want to play.

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #7 –
@odigg: Thanks for your suggestion!  Frankly, I did not know such devices exist  I think that's exactly what I'm looking for. The only problem is that all four of these are not available here in Poland, so I'll have to import one. The latter two both look great, but that might be overkill in my case. I won't buy anything better than those 595s in the foreseeable future  And Total Bithead, while affordable, looks just damn ugly to me. Headphonia Lyrix is not a beauty, but looks acceptable, and they promise free shipping, which is great, so that's my choice right now

USB power = bad since it can be noisy. Also, I might want to use this thing with my laptop, which doesn't have fully powered USB ports. Lyrix, however, can be powered both externally (which is good) and by battery (which is excellent), so that's another plus

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #8 –
My input for what is worth (since I cannot make a recommendation).

> I settled on the Echo AudioFire2.

This is a good recommendation but rather expensive. Echo is one of the few that conform to international standards rather than proprietrary ones and runs fine under Linux unlike most Firewire devices. But if you do not have firewire then it is a non-starter.

> How about the Edirol UA1-EX?

At this price I would have little concern about the look of the volume knob but I would echo a concern about USB power (which is not to say it is a problem in this case - I do not know). Both of odigg's headphones have relatively flat impedance curves unlike your Sennheiser 595s and so this check is not as relevant as it might be.

> M-Audio Audiophile 2496 USB

I believe this is an old USB 1 device which I am not sure is made anymore. I doubt it will run full duplex 24/96 which may or may not be an issue. I tried to look up the spec to confirm this but could not find it on m-audio's pages.

> If you just want a basic sound card that can power headphones, why are you looking into professional
> solutions?

The home audio consumer press is unreliable to put it mildly. You have recommended 4 products which might be OK (they are expensive enough to be OK) but also might be audiophile products or just incompetently designed. How can one tell?

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Esanssi on
Here's another one searching for affordable USB-sound card. I just need a good sound card which is able to transfer a digital signal from my laptop (Powerbook G4) to my amplifier. I guess it's impossible to bypass the resampling effect (at least I couldn't find any USB-sound card that would support sampling rate of 44.1) but then again I guess the sound cards know how to do it properly, so there shouldn't be any audible differences.

I've surfed the internet and came across this little piece of M-Audio called Transit. Any experiences on that one? It seems very suitable for my needs...


I've used a Transit with OS X for the last couple of years. If you're using it to transfer a digital signal, it works very well and it does not resample. (Yes, the Transit does support 44.1 kHz.) I've never had any issues with either the device or the M-Audio software. Very reliable and very affordable.

If you require analog out, I would not recommend the Transit for that purpose; its analog output is on the anemic side.

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #10 –
i have older echo indigo (output only version) sitting in the drawer (that is a pcmcia device), dunno about linux compatibility, it used to power some serious headphones without a hitch.

arh, i guess never laptops don't have pcmcia anymore?
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #11 –
Quote from: honestguv on
I believe this is an old USB 1 device which I am not sure is made anymore. I doubt it will run full duplex 24/96 which may or may not be an issue. I tried to look up the spec to confirm this but could not find it on m-audio's pages.

Yes, it's USB 1 and I've read somewhere that it doesn't fully deserve the 24/96 tag. I could have accepted this, but I've found something better

Quote from: honestguv on
The home audio consumer press is unreliable to put it mildly. You have recommended 4 products which might be OK (they are expensive enough to be OK) but also might be audiophile products or just incompetently designed. How can one tell?

After choosing Headstage Lyrix I went over to the Head-Fi forums and checked their reviews. Seems that the DAC could have been better, but it's good enough, and the amp is great. In the future, I can buy a better DAC and just use Lyrix as an amp if I want to. I know that these guys are audiophiles so they might hear things that I don't hear (300 hours of burn-in? ), but there's only one way to tell: test it myself  I can just sell it if I don't like it - it's not very expensive so I won't lose a lot of money  Plus, if I buy a professional audio interface, I'll get a box with lots of knobs, inputs and outputs and stuff, and I'll be using only the very basic functionality. A DAC/amp combo seems to be what I really need.

Besides good reviews, Lyrix has two things that I love:
1. It can be powered by a battery and it can recharge this battery, but not overcharge it. Right now I'm thinking about leaving my old PC alone and using my laptop as a music player, so a battery-powered DAC/amp combo will be a perfect fit  And I still have Windows XP on my laptop, so if this thing has problems under Linux, I'll keep Windows to play music and Linux to work
2. It has switches for gain, crossfeed, and bass boost. I don't know if I need these, since I rather prefer sound that has not been messed with, but on the other hand - I do love lots of bass in some kinds of music, and I've never tested hardware crossfeed. If I can just turn these things on and off, it's great

In fact, I might order my Lyrix today  It's made in Germany, which means easy and fast import (it's not really import, since it's within the EU).

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #12 –
Quote from: honestguv on
> If you just want a basic sound card that can power headphones, why are you looking into professional
> solutions?

The home audio consumer press is unreliable to put it mildly. You have recommended 4 products which might be OK (they are expensive enough to be OK) but also might be audiophile products or just incompetently designed. How can one tell?


I completely agree that the audio consumer press is unreliable.  Unfortunately, the quality of headphone jacks on pro audio equipment varies quite a bit.  Take the EMU 0404 USB.  The headphone out measures (RMAA) well unloaded, but seems to go crazy under low impedance loads.

I don't know if dedicated headphone amp makers test their hardware under load, but it seems more likely since they know somebody is going to plug a headphone into it.  They also know there are a wide variety of headphones out there and so may also test headphones with different impedances.

Gelatinous Blob - I think there are other headphone amps made in the EU region.  Unfortunately I don't know what they are!

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #13 –
Quote from: odigg on
Gelatinous Blob - I think there are other headphone amps made in the EU region.  Unfortunately I don't know what they are!

I'm pretty sure I'll find out sooner or later  I have a bad feeling that my first amp won't be the last...  As they say on the Head-Fi forums - "sorry for your wallet"

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Gelatinous Blob on
I'm pretty sure I'll find out sooner or later  I have a bad feeling that my first amp won't be the last...  As they say on the Head-Fi forums - "sorry for your wallet"


I think they should say some other things on head-fi, but I don't want to insult anybody.

Since you are on hyrdogenaudio I will encourage the following behavior.  Treat all recommendations and purchases with skepticsm.  When you do buy something or get a chance to test something, try bring that skepticism to that experience.  If nothing else please try to volume match when you are comparing amps/dacs/sources, etc.  I'm still surprised when I see how much even a small volume difference can do when you are testing equipment with your ears.

And, as you said, sorry for your wallet.

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #15 –
Quote from: odigg on
Since you are on hyrdogenaudio I will encourage the following behavior.  Treat all recommendations and purchases with skepticsm.

I try to  In fact, I decided to downgrade from Sennheiser HD 595 to 555, because I did not test the 595s. My thinking was that since I tested the 555 and I loved the sound, the 595s will sound even better. Then I realised how potentially stupid this line of reasoning is, so I decided to get the 555s for now. The problem is that I live in a fairly big city, but for some reason there are absolutely no hi-fi shops here. I have no chance to test, for example, Grado cans without driving several hundred kilometres, which sucks a lot. I can, of course, buy some cans, test them, and then resell them if I don't like them, but then I'll be basically losing money on the whole deal. Fortunately, I'm on a very tight budget right now, which does boost scepticism a lot

Anyway, thanks for your help. I learned so much since I started my quest for the perfect audio setup (which, of course, is never perfect )

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #16 –
For the record, here is my input on the Edirol UA-4FX I recently purchased. I have to say, I'm quite disappointed. Where to begin?
  • As far as I can tell (recording in loopback mode), the device isn't bit-perfect. EDIT oct. 27: turns out it is bit-perfect, I just wasn't testing it right the first time around.
  • The hardware sampling rate switch promised to offer the desired sampling rate with no software resampling and no doubt about what happens inside the device; as it turns out (I should have seen this coming), you have to physically unplug the USB cable and plug it back in when switching sampling rates. I was hoping that simply removing the linux driver module would do the trick, but it seems the device needs a full power cycle. Because of that inconvenience, I ended up setting it to 24bit/44.1kHz (for listening to music) and using software resampling on 48kHz sources such as movies 
  • The input source switch couldn't be more counter-productive. As with everything else on the device, it's a hardware switch; but for some reason, when set on "Digital In" (TOSLINK), the device still outputs analog sources when no digital signal is detected on the TOSLINK input. Crank the volume all the way up, put your fingers on the RCA or TRS inputs, and you can hear a lot of both background noise and static
    Even at listening volume, I could hear a faint background (white) noise, which is how I found out about this. The problem for me is that I need to use the TOSLINK output of my IPTV decoder. Solution: disable input monitoring on the UA-4FX (no noise whatsoever anymore), connect the IPTV decoder to another sound card with optical-in, and use some software (ecasound) to output that through the UA-4FX (with a more or less noticeable delay).
    Why Edirol made this one feature (and only that one) automatic is beyond me. I find it utterly moronic.
  • I was naive to think the volume knob would be analog. No sound is output at all when the knob is set to 1 or lower; the volume abruptly goes from complete silence to a quite audible level when I slightly turn the knob up from 1, which leads me to believe volume control is entirely digital (and quite imprecise at that, even at higher levels).
  • RCA output is very low in volume (much lower than the headphones TRS!); I highly doubt it goes to -10dBV. My standalone DVD player's RCA output is much, much louder (even than the UA-4FX's headphones TRS output). Also, the volume knob very inconveniently controls both the headphones and line-out volume. Line-in isn't any louder either.
  • The on-board digital effects cannot be used when the sampling rate is set at 96kHz. I wonder why that is. Is that a symptom of some serious limitation on the device?
  • When monitoring the TOSLINK input, every few minutes or so (albeit not in a cyclic manner), the audio drops out for a couple of seconds, while all the LEDs of the device blink. WTF? I thought it was happening only in that case, but it also happened once while I was watching a movie on my computer. It hasn't happened while listening to music though.
The good points:
  • With monitoring disabled (sound is output only from the PC), the output is very clean. I can't hear any background noise at all, with the volume knob turned all the way up or down.
  • Reasonably high volume for the headphones TRS jack, enough for movies with low-volume AC3 tracks, as well as some excessively quiet CDs from the 80's such as Kate Bush's The Whole Story (+2.06dB album gain).
  • The on-board effects are a nice touch. I particularly enjoy the Listen mode which lets me control bass and treble (desirable on some albums). The Tube Amp simulator is nice as well, although I prefer the Listen mode.
  • As far as I my ears can tell (with my Sennheiser HD555), sound quality is quite good. The UA-4FX sounds quite different from my motherboard's Realtek ALC883 chip, though. For a moment I thought I actually liked the latter better, but after listening to the same song over and over with both devices, I couldn't make out any difference anymore. Even if the ALC883 chip did sound better, the UA-4FX's bass and treble control more than make out for it.
All in all, the UA-4FX is a big let-down. It's very inconvenient in playback mode unless you stick to the computer as a source, use a single sampling rate, and output to headphones. As far as music listening goes, I guess the device is OK, but I expected a lot more functionality. Now I have to ignore everything I hate about it, until I can rake up enough money to buy a USB DAC with integrated heaphones amp designed for music listening. I haven't decided whether I should keep them for now and simply enjoy music, or if I should sell them at a loss.

EDIT oct. 19: I found out that the source selection switch, as well as the input monitor switch, don't require a power cycle to be changed. So I've come up with a slightly more convenient setup:
  • The UA-4FX is now permanently set to 24bit/44.1kHz for music playback with no resampling (for CD-DA and HDCD playback anyway), with either the input source switch set to LOOPBACK (no input gets output), or the input monitoring switch set to AUTO (off - same effect). The device still needs a power cycle if I want to switch it to 96kHz for DVD-Audio rips, for instance.
  • I play back 16bit/48kHz audio (e.g. DVD-Video sources) through my cheap Terratec Aureon MKII USB sound card (no resampling involved), which is connected via TOSLINK to my UA-4FX. Thus, when I want to watch a DVD, I only have to switch the input source selector to DIGITAL (or the input monitoring switch to ON, if the input source selector was set to DIGITAL already); no power cycle required. What I'm looking out for is audio drop-outs. I will report back if that happens.
  • The IPTV decoder is now connected to the UA-4FX's line-in RCA connectors. I would have prefered a digital connection, but the Terratec is already connected to the optical-in. Again, I only need to switch the input source selector to ANALOG when I want to watch TV. It's not perfect, but IPTV audio sucks anyway (over-compressed broadcasts, low bitrate audio…).

USB sound card recommendations

Reply #17 –
I'm using TerraTec's Aureon Dual USB. It's a simple, nice and cheap USB Device with optical SPDIF output.
.halverhahn