Sunday, February 17, 2008

Notebook Audio

My notebook audio (Intel HDA) is terrible. Using jackd, I constantly get xruns, and I cannot change any parameters to try and alleviate the problem.

So, I bought an external USB audio device, plugged it in, and it just worked. No more xruns. Jackd no longer complains, and I have 5ms latency. Amazing. Even a cheap ($5) USB device performed better than the internal audio device in my laptop. It's an XPS M1330 by the way.

To celebrate I bought a pair of Edirol MA-15 Monitor speakers, which are a pleasure to listen to. Now I can look forward to getting to grips with Pure Data, or maybe Galan, which looks quite interesting.

3 comments:

René Dudfield said...

Hey,

I really like cheap USB sound cards too :)

Here's where I've linked up 6 of them off a USB hub:
http://renesd.blogspot.com/2007/04/one-speaker-per-child-ospc-project.html

So you can hook up heaps of USB sound cards... you can even make them into one virtual sound card with alsa, and also with pulse.

Anonymous said...

Where can I get a $5 USB audio device? What make/model is it?

DEADC0DE said...

maybe it's not the notebook audio that's bad, but the linux driver implementation for that notebook audio...

Popular Posts