ubuntu sound to hi-fi amplifier

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 03:36:47PM -0500, Stephen wrote:
> My receiver is an ONKYO 656 circa 2001. The manual says nothing about 
> S/PDIF, but it does refer to digital coax.
> 
> I know the optical works, so that is why I was leaning in that direction.

Well optical cables cost more than coax, and cards with optical are much
less common than those that support coax.  I am not sure I have seen
optical on anything other than onboard on a few mainboards, and on drive
bay modules on high end cards.

Of course the sound card (or driver) still has to convert the sample
rate of the audio into whatever the link expects it to be.  Some only do
48khz, some do 44.1, 48, 96 and 192khz, others are very flexible.
Hopefully your receiver supports them all, or at least the ones you are
likely to use.

Depending on how much you are willing to spend, cards such as the Asus
Xonar D2 (or D2X for PCI express) have digital coax and optical toslink
support.  It also has amazing analog quality.  It is supported by alsa
in the 1.0.18 version (included in 2.6.27 kernel).  It runs about $160.

Another option with digital coax/optical is the E-MU 0404PCI, which is
about half the cost of the Xonar D2 at about $90.  This too has support
in alsa in recent versions as far as I can tell, although I have never
used one myself.

I haven't found any cheap usb devices with digital audio (at least not
that I can tell if have linux support or not).

The cheapest option in general is to make sure you buy a mainboard with
the feature on it in the first place, since in that case it adds almost
no cost at all.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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