I need a good USB soundcard that works fully with CF

[Lum]

Edit: I'm going to turn this post into a list of USB cards and how they work in CF. Post your experiences here and I'll try to keep it up to date unless, of course, Flux start their own list.

M-Audio Sonica theatre: BAD. CF Mixer does not work, resumes from hibernate at full volume regardless of setting in CF, 5.1 does work but only in "virtual surround" mode which is not ideal for cars (and completely unusable with CF on an M10000)
TerraTec Aureon USB MkII: FAIR. CF Mixer does not work. 4.0 and 5.1 do work. 4.1 can be acheived just fine using 5.1 mode. Terratec mixer will not embed properly in CF
Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Roadie: ? CF mixer does not work, unsure yet if 4.0, 4.1 and 5.1 are usable.

I'd like to hear from more people on this one. Someone must have tried this with a Creative Labs card?

Original post follows:

I'm sick of my Sonica Theatre, it can't do something simple like duplicate the front channel onto the rear, all it can do is front only stereo, mono to all 4 or various forms of virtual surround sound that hog the CPU and break CentraFuse in horrible ways (like causing response times of about 10 seconds, or not noticing that you've released the volume up button - owch!)

So, I'm after a USB soundcard that is nice and small like the Sonica Theatre and bus powered. It needs to support at least 4.0 output, preferably with the option for 4.1 later, have all 6 volume controls actually working within CF and be able to operate in quadraphonic mode without hammering my CPU.

So what soundcards are you guys using, I'm particularly interested in hearing from someone using such a card with an EPIA M10000 or lower spec board since all you Pentium 4 people aren't going to have this kind of issue with input lag in CentraFuse.

Currently looking at the Terratec Aureon MkII USB anyone got any experience with this card?

[MarcelP]

I look for at present also a suitable soundcard for 5.1-Sound. Are there recommendations from others?

[Lum]

Oh well, I've ordered the Terratec card, it's only 30 quid.
I'll post a trip report once I've received it and installed it.

[MarcelP]

why did you buy exactly these? Any characteristics? :-)

[Lum]

I bought the Terratec card linked in my first post. It will not arrive until tomorrow, but I will be sure to report back on how well it works with CentraFuse once I've had a chance to install it in the car.

Edit: Ahh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. I bought it because it got good reviews for general purpose use (and some guy on a forum somewhere stated it could do quadrophonic) and also the device itself looks to be very small, which is an important issue for my install as the soundcard is installed on top of the transmission tunnel behind the handbrake.

[MarcelP]

very goog. are very strained on the test of results! look for also urgently extra sound card.

[Lum]

First impressions:

The device is suitably small, smaller than a CD case (although thicker) and seems to be well built, it's made in Taiwan.

The driver is a simple enough affair, it seems to be a fairly generic driver (as the device identifies itself as just "USB Audio" in device manager, and a fairly simple mixer applet comes with it, with various volume controls for playback and recording and an option to set Stereo, Quadro or 5.1

I tested each of these modes with my headphones on a 500MHz and CPU usage was no different from playing the same MP3 in Media Player Classic on the onboard PCI sound (ESS Audiodrive), it may have been slightly higher in 5.1 mode but only by a few percent (bearing in mind this laptop is slow, even the onboard hardware accelerated sound was using 20% CPU!)

There is no surround sound processing going on here, the output on the rear channel is identical to the front channel, and plugging the headphones into the centre/sub jack gets you what sounds to be mono in one ear and bass in the other. Exactly what you'd expect in other words. I dont think the lack of a 4.1 option will be an issue here as you can just use 5.1 and not hook up the centre channel.

I couldn't detect any bass being cut from the mains when 5.1 is enabled, but given that my headphones could barely render the LFE channel anyway, this is not suprising. If you're using this thing in a car your amp should have a hi pass / lo pass filter anyway.

Unfortunately, it's not all wonderful though, there are a couple of niggles.

You cannot control the rear channel in CentraFuse. Despite them using a generic driver, it's obviously not generic enough for CF. This may be due to the fact that rather than use front+rear volume controls and then a balance control, it uses one master volume control, and then you set the gain in dB on each speaker individually. This could actually be quite useful in a car, especially since the app supports loading and saving presets, so you could create settings optimal for one, two or four passengers, unfortunately this facility is somewhat negated by the fact that the application doesn't save your speaker gain options, just the mixer settings!

In any case, the mixer application cannot be embedded properly in CF. When it tries, the application always draws itself right at the top of the screen, then gets obliterated by CFs title bar. This means you cannot access the tabs at the top of the app to change to the speaker configuration tab. You are stuck at the mixer tab which contains all the sliders that CF can control!

The last thing, and it isn't really a problem. If you unplug the soundcard while the mixer application is running, then said app crashes and tries to send an error report to microsoft.


In conclusion, so long as your happy to set up your rear speakers just once and then not try to adjust them while driving, then this is a good card to get, if you need the rear speaker adjustment to work then find another card. Are there any USB cards that actually work properly in CF?!

[MarcelP]

(..... if you need the rear speaker adjustment to work then find another card. Are there any USB cards that actually work properly in CF?!)

I would like to know that also gladly. In addition times the developers must announce themselves to word!

[loginfailed]

Are there any USB cards that actually work properly in CF?!

If someone is making a list of USB cards that do/dont work properly in CF, add this..

The Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Roadie DOES NOT work properly. It uses its own mixer.

[Ryan711]

Originally Posted by loginfailed

If someone is making a list of USB cards that do/dont work properly in CF, add this..

The Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Roadie DOES NOT work properly. It uses its own mixer.

I absolutely hate that it uses its own mixer because if the sound is up too much on the roadie mixer, then the music will become distorted for some reason. So bascially I just set the volume to almost 0 on the roadie mixer and use the windows one for my volume control.