Re: [LAU] surround sound with stereo usb DACs?

On Thursday 15 January 2009 09:46:47 david wrote:
> Bearcat M. ªandor wrote:
> > I actually have a M-Audio delta 1010LT. I found i could not play two
> > streams at the same time. So i hooked things up to the intelHD (onboard
> > sound) and was amazed at how much better it sounded. I was dumbstruck. A
> > cloudiness was gone and imaging was much more precise. I don't know
> > what to say save that my intelhd may have advanced past the Delta 1010LT.
> > It's an old card and this board is only year old.
> I seriously doubt the HDA has gotten better than a 1010LT. More likely
> you didn't have it or something else on the system setup right.

This is not a question about quality. Its about consumer cards allowing
several apps to open parallel streams. (One of the first to start this was the
soundblaster live.)
This comes with a huge quality drawback: As these different streams have
possibly different sampling rates and bit depths, the hardware chip is re-
sampling (and the intel hda is resampling everything to 48kHz). You can be
sure that these resampling-algorithms are not as good as the ones in the high-
quality range like the secret rabbit...

And alsa has worked around this "only one app at a time" problem long ago,
only distributions didn't pick it up the right way.

Arnold

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