Ideal soundcard?

Hi,

I am going to play music from an online radio service such as last.fm or the hard drive through a laptop connected to an amp that will play music in multiple rooms...

It is important that the sound card connecting the laptop is using the expresscard interface... ideally the 34 as I would like to be able to buy a small notebook, but if that means sacrificing proper hardware acceleration, I'd much rather get a 54mm card...

An optical out would be great to connect the computer to the amp as well.

So if you guys have any recommendations for a sound card, they would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

 

Might help if you name a price range...

creative will possibly have the cheapest products - but obviously there are more expensive and better ones out there.

On a side note, why not just the regular 3,5mm headphone jack and feed into the Amplifier using that?

 

Probably 100-200$ ?

I was looking only at the creatives... wasn't aware of other brands! The only reason I'm looking at options besides the 3.5mm jack is to get better sound quality...

 

The 3,5mm jack has less to do with quality than a decent soundcard.

- I think there might be a few products in that price range.

There is one product... and I'm annoyed the name has escaped me... that might be worth it...

The other thing is - you possibly won't a soundcard which does the work, as the desktop models do, apparently a lot of Creative products run on the CPU...
(Not that I notice though)

 

I'm glad that there will be options... but I'd like to get one with good value for money.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I was under the impression that an optical out from a dedicated soundcard would make a big difference to sound quality when compared to the standard 3.5mm jack...

I don't mind losing some CPU power to the sound processing as i'm not going to be gaming or performing any cpu intensive tasks... but I would prefer direct hardware acceleration (again as i'm under the impression that this would provide better SQ).

 

I suppose an optical output can improve over a 3,5mm jack - I was more thinking along the "red & white cables" vs. 3,5mm

But hasn't your laptop got optical output incorporated in its headphone jack?

I know 3 of our old laptops used too, not sure about my Vaio...
(at least they had that option in a menu and where shining a red light out of the headphone jack )

Found them... I have heard these mentioned in the past - I have NO experience with them myself:
http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/ExpressCard/index.php

 

I'm not sure if it has optical out in its headphone jack? It's a dell studio xps 13...

I was thinking of getting an optical out via a dedicated soundcard for best SQ

optical via usb or optical via 3.5 would be atleast slightly lower SQ right?

The reason I'm so keen on the interfaces is cos I feel the sound quality can vary hugely when being played via the amp and big speakers when the source is as good as possible...

 

I've never played with optical output....

USB may be a bottleneck... it really depends on your equipment...

Ideally you get a professional product... but then again - there is no sense in the best soundcard with little earbuds (not IEMs) - and no sense in the worst integrated soundcard with the best speakers set up well...

Try figuring out if you have an optical output in te headphone jack
If you have, see how that sounds - also try the 3,5mm headphone jack.

If you still aren't satisfied - look at a professional product, the Echo Indigo I linked to above - they retail around 200$ for the 10x - now, I'm not sure if it plays nice with Vista etc. but if you really hear tiny differences you'd have to look at products in this range...
On the other hand... it seems this one doesn't have otpical output.

Just thinking... with new years eve there won't be a lot of activity.
Maybe you wait a couple of days there are people who know more than I do about this

 

Why not something like a Roku SoundBridge or similar. List price on those things is close to $100- ebay shows a few on auction for less than $75-

Not everything requires a hard drive and a consumer OS.

My Soundbridge M1000 (the current model is the M1001) has an optical out and wireless networking.

http://soundbridge.roku.com/soundbridge/index.php

 

That sounds like a great sound card, way better than Creative on paper. Also no need to worry about Creative's driver Hell. One problem though... that doesn't list an optical out.

 

I'd almost think the fact that you're streaming from an online radio service will result in poorer quality than the soundcard, although I admit that I haven't kept up with the quality of streaming radio these days. I've enjoyed my AK-R8 surround sound headphones for a bit over a year now, and they sell the USB soundcard/adaptor portion separately as the Audio Advantage SRM, here ( http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/audio-advantage-srm/home.aspx). It does come with an S/PDIF optical out, and although it's sold out on the Turtle Beach home page, it's apparently listed as available through Amazon.

 

As far as USB sound cards go, the TurtleBeach units (2 or 3 models) are well thought of at avsforums.

 

DetlevCM, I don't think the dell has optical out in the 3.5mm port... but the echo looks pretty interesting and despite the lack of optical out, i think using high quality cable would produce very high quality sound!

And yea i hope we get a few more replies tomorrow! also, i just noticed you were the one that wrote the 32 bit vs 64 bit article which was really helpful a couple of days ago when i was deciding what to get!

Newsposter, the Roku looks perfect, but the specs were a lil disappointing - only 16 bit sound with 48 khz sampling... i think this is less than the onboard sound processing with the common intel hd audio standard. but its great value for money though! it would be a great if they had a higher spec model... and also, i need to get a small laptop anyway, so thats why it makes more sense for me to get a soundcard for it...

LaptopGun, yea the lack of optical out was a downer though the specs look pretty impressive... are creative drivers not good? i have no previous experience but i was under the impression that they were the most common soundcards!

 

I used the echo Indigo for the same purpose. Excellent sound and good build quality.

 

Judicator, it's not only for online radio, i would also use it for playing my music collection on my hard drive... but I think some payed services offer considerably better sound quality!

Does turtlebeach offer an expresscard solution? that would be prefect if it did...

anyway thanks a lot guys and a very very happy new year to all of you!

 

mobytoby, so you've used the echo indigo with the RCA cables? is there any version of the echo platform with optical out??

thank you for sharing your experience! and hope you have a happy new year!

 

Quite possibly on the pay services, but my worry lies more in the bandwidth of the streaming more than anything else. Still, if you're using the hard drive music collection, then yes, that's a separate thing entirely.

Unfortunately, Turtle Beach only offers USB and full-size PCI slot cards. I wonder, though, how much data does a good quality sound stream actually need? Would it saturate a USB 2.0 throughput?

 

Nice to hear the article has been of interest to someone I was getting fed up with all the 32 vs 64 Bit threads solution - write a recommendation
Too bad you don't have optical output... would have made life easier.
And the Echo - look around for regarding support as they don't officially list Vista.

 

Creative are notorious for glitch filled drivers and using drivers to extort money out of their customers. They bought and sued all their competitors into a near monopoly. They also imfamously tried to sue the user who would re-write their drivers to actually you know work with computers they may or may not have wanted the sound cards to work on. I deal with onboard audio (desktop and laptop), but I'd be hard pressed to buy something from them. Creative Labs are anti-consumer in my opinion.

Full disclosure: I also abhor Intel's past behavior yet my current laptop has a "few" parts from Intel (CPU, mainboard, wireless N card, SSD)