8.1. Which sound card is best?
By the word "best" I mean best for gaming. Gamers want high quality sound for our games with the least amount of tinkering. On the other hand, a musician would have a very different concept of what "best sound card" would mean. If you're a musician, you might want to check out the Linux Audio Quality HOWTO .
Now that Linux is beginning to mature, this question isn't as important as it used to be. Once upon a time, soundcards without onboard MIDI chips (most PCI sound cards) didn't do MIDI. This was mostly a problem for things like xdoom or lxdoom using musserv. These days we have MIDI emulators like Timidity and libraries like SDL which don't require hardware MIDI support. Frankly, I've had many cards and I can't tell the difference between any of them for gaming. If you want to do things like convert a record LP to digital format, then your choice of a soundcard with a professional grade A/D converter is absolutely crucial. For this HOWTO, we'll assume that you're more of a gamer than a studio recording engineer.
Your decision should be based on what will be the easiest to configure. If you already have a card and it works well, that's good enough. If you're in the market to buy a sound card, get something that will take you a second to configure. PCI cards are much easier to deal with than ISA since you don't need to tell their drivers about which system resources (IRQ, DMA, I/O addresses) to use. Some ISA cards ARE plug-n-play, like the Creative AWE-64, and the Linux kernel has come a long way in auto configuring them.
My personal recommendation is any card which has the es1370 or es1371 chip, which uses the es1370 and es1371 sound drivers on Linux. These cards include the older Ensoniq es1370 and newer Creative PCI-128. These cards are extremely cheap and trivial to get working under Linux.
I used to be a fan of the Creative Soundblaster AWE 32, AWE 64 and AWE 64 gold soundcards. These ISA PnP cards are well supported by both OSS and Alsa. They all use the same E-mu 8000 synthesis chip which enables them to play 32 voices simultaneously (they have 32 "channels"). A few notes: First, the Soundblaster AWE HOWTO is very out of date. Second, the AWE 64 and AWE 64 gold can play 64 voices simultaneously, but this is done in software. Creative never released a Linux driver for these cards (and they never released programming information to Linux developers), so Linux users cannot use the extra 32 channels on the AWE 64 and AWE 64 gold. As far Linux users are concerned, all three cards are completely identical (although the AWE 64 gold has gold plated connectors, which are better for sound quality than the more common steel connectors).
The Creative Soundblaster Live! is an extremely popular PCI sound card these days. I've never owned one, so I cannot comment here. However, there have been numerous reports about serious problems with the Live! and AMD motherboards that use the 686b southbridge. A google search should turn up alot of information on this problem.
A more relevent issue is speakers, but even here the difference isn't huge. I've had expensive Altec Lansing speakers perform only slightly better than el-cheapo speakers. You get what you pay for with speakers, but don't expect a huge difference. You'll want to get something with a separate sub-woofer; this does make a difference at a cost of extra power and connector wires.
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