fibre

By anders pearson 17 Oct 2002

when i bought my desktop machine a little over 3 years ago, it came with an onboard yamaha soundcard that, at the time, didn’t have any linux support. for a couple months or so i just lived without sound.

by november or so of that year, i’d gotten pretty tired of not being able to listen to my mp3 collection. but, being an extremely poor student, i couldn’t exactly spend a lot of money on a new soundcard. i got about the cheapest one i could find, an ISA soundblaster 16, for about $12. all i had for speakers at that point were a couple little computer speakers so it really wasn’t that bad a setup. the card has served me faithfully ever since.

a year ago, when i moved into my apartment and actually had a bit of money to spare, i bought myself a very nice, high quality surround sound receiver and speaker system. so at this point, to listen to mp3s, i was taking the output of a headphone jack on a $12 sound card and running it into the input of a $600 receiver.

eventually i got a big hard-drive, ripped my entire CD collection, and filled the rest with music gotten from my <a href=”http://www.emusic.com/“>emusic.com</a> subscription. now i’d turned the computer into the centerpiece of my entertainment system. virtually all listening to music in my apartment was through the computer, and hence, through that $12 sound card and cheap 1/8” to RCA converter connecting it to the stereo.

last week i finally smartened up. started doing some research into cards with optical SPDIF outputs (since my receiver has an input) and eventually selected the <a href=”http://www.digit-life.com/articles/zoltrixpro6/“>Nightingale 6</a>. it was reasonably inexpensive, had optical SPDIF (without requiring a full drive bay like some of the creative labs cards), and advertised full linux support (this was confirmed on some linux mailing lists).

it came in the mail yesterday. installation was almost too easy. i stuck the card in, compiled the <a href=”http://www.alsa-project.org/“>ALSA</a> driver for it and it worked. well, the analog output worked immediately. i was unable to get the digital output working until i realized that that digital output channel was muted by default.

so now my setup is vastly improved. i’ve got a perfect, distortion free link straight from the media player on my computer to a high quality digital receiver. life is good.