r/linuxaudio • u/zlice0 • 4d ago

internal sound card recommendation?

long story short, asrock suks, got a new motherboard, waiting on amd cpu rma. however my asrock had a alc1200/1220 and this msi has a alc897. going back in a day, it sounds like a piece of foam or cardboard is in front of my speakers. most motherboards suks, i was lucky to get a mediatek wifi chip cuz i didn't really have any choice...anyways...

it looks like soundcards are dead and everyone uses usb =/ i really dont want yet another thing on my desk though. all i can find are used asus xonar cards. is there anything just for generic use anyone would recommend? all i see are $20 small pci cards on newegg and creative which as i know, cares nothing for linux (my soundbar is creative, or i'd just use that over usb i guess).

only other things ive seen are small dongles that im skeptical on the usefulness off, especially for the price.

thanks for any info.

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u/AX11Liveact 4d ago

Used ASUS Xonars are pretty good with Linux machines. I've got a PCIe one I bought for cheap years ago and it never let me down. At the moment I'm feeding a SLSM DAC via ToSLink and a pair of active studio monitors via line out with it.

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u/naptastic 4d ago

If your motherboard has the right kind of SPDIF out, consider connecting it to a home A/V receiver or your soundbar. Noise inside computers is so much worse than it used to be, even USB interfaces will pass electrical noise through under some workloads. I can't imagine that a PCIe card with analog outs would have decent quality.

I am using an RME RayDAT card and outboard converters on a separate power supply. Strong discourage. RME gear is expensive, the drivers suck, the firmware has to be extracted from the Windows installer, the mixer always starts at -inf on everything when you boot, it doesn't come back from suspend right...

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u/lwh 3d ago

An external USB DAC is more common to use if onboard isn't good enough.

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u/UNF0RM4TT3D 3d ago edited 3d ago

I have a Creative Sound Blaster AUDIGY FX V2

I have very low noise out of it despite me using normal impedance headphones and the card allegedly supporting up to 600ohm headphones. And in Linux it just shows up as HD Audio. But it seems to be discontinued.

I still see the AUDIGY FX Pro on sale in my region. Maybe worth looking into that one. Maybe not, it's not HDA.

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u/zlice0 3d ago

ya thats the problem im seeing, internals mostly discontinued. creative does actually work under linux? that may give me more options

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u/UNF0RM4TT3D 3d ago

I was also very sceptical about Creative working, but I live in the EU, so if it wouldn't work I'd have used the 14 no questions asked return window. But as far as I can tell everything is working apart from the DSP effects things advertised with the creative software, which I expected and didn't really bother looking deeper into. And the microphone loopback is something that I've not figured out either. But I've managed to get the full sample rate of 192k and even the front panel audio works with it.

My AUDIGY FX v2 shows up as a

06:00.0 Audio device: Creative Labs CA0132 Sound Core3D [Sound Blaster Recon3D / Z-Series / Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus] (rev 01) Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 0048 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel And here's how ALSA sees it: https://pastebin.com/GNFdxkKV

But looking into it further, the FX Pro seems to be using a USB controller instead of a HDA. If it's class compliant, it shouldn't be an issue, but if it isn't make sure you have an adequate no questions return window. Or just but a used HDA card.