i'm looking for a linux compatible sound card, little better than a HT Omega Striiker

[germlin]

I'm looking for a linux compatible sound card, a little bit better than a HT Omega Striker, to power music playing on ubuntu (but not too much more expensive). I have a set of 5.1 speakers, really nice ones, and really -- my sound, isn't too impressive with the HT Omega Striker playing mp3s. granted, i dont have a stereo, so its my only music sound, but i'd literally think I could get better than what I have, especially for that investment of money. The speakers are connected through the standard green, white, and orange cables, and i am running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and I have disabled pulseaudio.

thanks so much

[germlin]

what do ip bans or country bans have to do with a inexpensive sound card that is better than the HT Omega Striker?

[lordmozilla]

Have you had a look at USB dac's? Don't know if you can get any that have 5.1 output, but they are usually not too expensive, external so eliminate noise and give you very nice output sound for music.

But if you're just playing mp3's could be overkill...

[germlin]

Have you had a look at USB dac's? Don't know if you can get any that have 5.1 output, but they are usually not too expensive, external so eliminate noise and give you very nice output sound for music.

But if you're just playing mp3's could be overkill...

hello

thanks for the reply. i'd need 5.1 output for my 5.1 speakers tho. had no idea some of the usb options were decent.

[deanjo]

hello

thanks for the reply. i'd need 5.1 output for my 5.1 speakers tho. had no idea some of the usb options were decent.

What exactly is wrong with the HT Striker? The Cmedia chip on that is very well supported in linux.

[duby229]

hello

thanks for the reply. i'd need 5.1 output for my 5.1 speakers tho. had no idea some of the usb options were decent.

My advice is to re-encode the originsl music from the CD to flac. That is going to be a much better investment then a new sound card will. That sound card you have now will play all of your MP3's to the quality that they were encoded in. If you want a better quality sound then buying a new sound card isnt going to give it to you. You'll need to re-encode into flac, or if file size is of import to you then make it vorbis.

[KDesk]

duby229 is right, Flac is a much better audio codec. Being Flac a lossless audio codec, it doesn't loss any audio data, other codecs, like mp3 or vorbis (much better) are lossy codecs.

But it also depends, for classic or electronic music, with Flac the difference is very big compared to mp3 at 256 Kb/s and more with 128.
But (I'm not sure, that is only my experience, and depends on the codecs) with music that use only one range of frequencies, you can encode into ogg Vorbis at quality 5 (~150 Kb/s) and it would sound very similar to the original.

My recomendation is that if you have enough disc space, then you can encode everything with Flac, and later you can reencode a copy of it to ogg -q 5 or mp3 at a high bit rate to put this on a portable player.