Linux Picking Up Support For The Fireface UCX High-End Professional Audio Solution

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Picking Up Support For The Fireface UCX High-End Professional Audio Solution

Should you be assembling a recording studio or have another purpose for some high-end audio kit, the RME Fireface UCX is the latest sound device seeing support in the upstream Linux kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RME-Fireface-UCX-Linux

[spykes]

It's really a shame that we still have to rely on "reverse engineering" to support this kind of hardware in 2019...

[ssokolow]

Desktop motherboards do have professional quality audio interfaces.

Tell me about it. I've made a habit of keeping a few of these things around to give to friends and family who I want to voice-chat with because plugging your microphone into one results in significantly reduced noise compared to the motherboard input.

(Just don't rely on them to be robust or have good-quality audio output. The factory pinched pennies by not soldering the reinforcing tabs on the USB connector or including a couple of components on the output side.)

[wizard69]

This reads a bit like some sort of code. I’m assuming you are saying that motherboards DO NOT have quality audio in.

In anyevent you seem to have considerable experience here so the question that come to mind is this, what modern audio interface hardware would you suggest for simple AV production. Maybe there is a web site that highlights semi pro and pro audio gear on the web, that is gear well supported under Linux.

In a nut shellfinding well supportted gear for Linux isn’t exactly a piece of cake. Here well supportted means quality drivers.

Desktop motherboards do have professional quality audio interfaces. I managed sold the Yamaha DSP factory card and the AX44 analog if box for 50 euros. I did pay a lot of it in 90's. zynaddsubfx-dssi and fluidsynth-dssi are great software synths that integrates fine to Rosegarden. My dream did came true with Debian, a software based music creation system. This kind of a system is much better than was in 80's with best selling records. So you do not need much money to be creative.

[ssokolow]

Motherboard audio I/O connectors are shielded so more noise you will have with a such plastic USB adapter and using usb audio uses more cpu resources.

In theory, they should be. In practice, I have yet to encounter a computer where the SNR didn't audibly improve when the microphone was switched over to one of those things.

If you try to argue that my ears are lying to me on such a clear and unambiguous improvement, all you'll do is kill your own credibility.

[ssokolow]

This reads a bit like some sort of code. I’m assuming you are saying that motherboards DO NOT have quality audio in.

In anyevent you seem to have considerable experience here so the question that come to mind is this, what modern audio interface hardware would you suggest for simple AV production.

Unfortunately, I'm not an audio specialist. I'm just a programmer who still finds it amazing that a $1-2 half-assed Chinese USB audio device consistently produces a noticeable drop in microphone noise for VoIP use compared to the inputs on every motherboard I've tested.

[numacross]

All of my motherboards since 2009 have had high end analog audio inputs and outputs. My current mobo has:
http://www.datasheetcafe.com/alc887-...codec-realtek/
3.„ High-performance DACs with 97dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), ADCs with 90dB SNR
4.„ Four stereo DACs (8 channels) support 16/20/24-bit PCM format for 7.1 sound playback.
5.„ Two stereo ADCs (4 channels) support 16/20/24-bit PCM format recording simultaneously
6. All DACs supports 16/20/24-bit, 44.1k/48k/96k/192kHz sample rate

You're quoting marketing material and not even the motherboard vendor's since it's on them to keep those wonderful specifications valid.

Featuring eight channels of DAC support 7.1 sound playback, and integrates two stereo ADC that can support a stereo microphone, and feature Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC), Beam Forming (BF), and Noise Suppression (NS) for voice applications.

Most of those features are actually properly implemented only in the Realtek Windows driver, are they supported fully by Linux or are they "supported" just like using the built-in Windows drivers? In the latter case the features are visible and usable, but the quality of audio is degraded heavily until the Realtek driver is installed.

Personally I've had quite a bit of problems with Realtek audio gear while almost none with USB-based audio.

Use a studio microphone with the XLR connector and the shielded cable.

That doesn't make sense for his use case. Clearly he wrote that he uses the USB audio devices to make VoIP microphones sound better and that suggests no studio quality gear.

[WestCoastSuccess]

wizard69 try checking out the Ardour community (start at ardour.org) for info on good outboard gear that works with Linux - the mailing list may prove helpful. I've been using an M-Audio FireWire Solo in Linux with Ardor to record guitars and vocals for a decade, with excellent fidelity and extremely low latency (~2.7ms), if that's important to your use case.

[ssokolow]

We are discussing about pro audio here. I record songs with a studio microphone and my kid communicates with friends while playing computer games.

...and it all started because I tried to commiserate on how badly motherboard manufacturers tend to drop the ball.

[Weasel]

All of my motherboards since 2009 have had high end analog audio inputs and outputs.

Do yourself a favor and get/try something like the Topping D10, which is relatively cheap. Difference is like night and day.

Can't offer advice about an ADC or mic input since I don't use that kind of thing. Point is, integrated mobo interfaces can't be considered "pro" or even "semi-pro" by any means, sorry.