July 20, 2009 -- It is not often that we look at audio products at Phoronix. Usually we are looking at sound cards with their Linux driver, like the Creative X-Fi Linux fiasco and the ALSA drivers for high-end sound cards. Occasionally we will look at gaming headphones and we have even looked at multi-million dollar home theaters, but in this review, we are checking out a simple 2.1 speaker system. The folks over at Xoxide recently sent out the Altec Lansing VS2421 speaker system, which we are testing out this morning.

November 06, 2008 -- The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

April 18, 2008 -- Next to drivers for graphics cards and (Atheros and Broadcom) wireless chipsets, the Creative Labs X-Fi series is one of the most complained about pieces of hardware for its Linux support or there the lack of. The Creative X-Fi sound card series is a few years old, but it wasn't until a few months ago that open and closed-source drivers started coming about for this hardware. However, this sound card has still been left in a sorry state, but this week Creative Labs has finally pushed out another Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux beta driver. But does this driver correct their wrong doings from the past?

April 04, 2008 -- We haven't looked at a new Razer product since February of 2007 when reviewing the DeathAdder, but with products from the Copperhead to the Mantis, we have been impressed with their exceptional quality. The Razer Barracuda AC-1 did initially have some problems with Linux, but those have since been worked out with the ALSA Snd-Oxygen driver. Today up on the review block is a new Razer audio product and that is the Piranha Gaming Communicator, which is a headset designed for gamers with true-to-life audio quality and a noise-filtering microphone.

February 05, 2008 -- Last Friday 4Front Technologies had released the binaries and source-code to OSS 4.0 Build 1013. This new build of the Open Sound System brings two major changes, which include the full source code now being available for the M-Audio Revolution and Delta sound card drivers, and a beta driver for the Sound Blast X-Fi series from Creative Labs. While earlier Sound Blaster generations have worked quite well with ALSA and OSS, the Creative X-Fi series is a black sheep under Linux. The X-Fi support that Creative Labs has provided to the Linux community has been abominable and support via ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has yet to go anywhere while support for the complete X-Fi series via OSS is just starting to emerge. Interestingly though, Creative had provided the register documentation and other code to 4Front Technologies for this new "sbxfi" driver.

January 12, 2008 -- Last week I had received a unique CES invitation from Rogers & Cowan, a PR firm representing an array of entertainment and technology companies, about one of their clients that advertises itself as the makers of the "world's most extravagant and technologically advanced systems for audio-video purists." For the Consumer Electronic Show, participating companies will either have a booth or suite somewhere in Las Vegas, but that wasn't the case for Goldmund, this Rogers & Cowan client that specializes in high-end audio/video systems. Their systems are so advanced that they simply cannot be built in a day or even a week, but for each of their media rooms they spend extensive time planning and constructing the rooms that are slated to be perfect, even an imperfect world. With that said, it was easier and more cost effective for Goldmund to just have four other writers and I check out their luxurious home theater systems in a demonstration home near Los Angeles.

December 10, 2007 -- We discovered back in September when running the Razer Barracuda AC-1 with ALSA 1.0.15 that this sound card was quite problematic with the initial CMI8788 ALSA driver. However, last month we reported that the driver was being rewritten from scratch with a much brighter outlook. We have retested the Barracuda AC-1 with its C-Media CMI8788 Oxygen APU using the latest snd-oxygen driver, which also works with other high-end sound cards such as the ASUS Xonar and Auzentech X-Meridian.

September 23, 2007 -- The X-Fi family of sound cards from Creative Labs has been around for over two years but through this time there has been no Linux support officially from Creative or from the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Among the Creative X-Fi solutions are the X-Fi XtremeGamer, X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro, X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series, and the X-Fi Elite Pro. However, Creative Labs is on the heals of finally releasing a new audio Linux driver that supports the X-Fi family. The driver that will be released any day now is considered beta software, but worst of all is that this sound driver will be closed-source.

September 12, 2007 -- Last November at Phoronix we had featured a preview of the Razer Barracuda AC-1 sound card and after taking off its EMI shield we had found that this card depended upon the C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8788 audio processor, which at the time was not supported under Linux. Though support had come in the Open Sound System (OSS) version 4.0 for this CMI8788 APU. Well, now finally in ALSA 1.0.15 the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture will support this C-Media audio chip. ALSA 1.0.15-rc1 was released recently and contains the initial CMI8788 audio driver. In this article we will be taking a quick look at where this driver stands today for the Razer Barracuda AC-1 under Linux.

November 25, 2006 -- It has been almost two years since we first heard of LTB Audio Systems and decided to look at their USB True 5.1 Surround Sound Headphones. The headphones were surprisingly well designed for coming from this relatively unheard of company. Listen To Believe (LTB) has recently introduced their Magnum 5.1 USB Headphones, which is what we will be looking at today. These headphones offer a built in microphone, onboard audio control, and is true 5.1 surround sound.