High quality sound

[Yuriy Tsibizov]

> Quoting "S.N.Grigoriev" <gregory at mdmspb.com> (from Fri, 1 Sep 2006 15:52:13 
> +0400):
>
>> I would like to know if there is a hardware/software combination
>> allowing FreeBSD(amd64) to be a CD player with sound quality
>> comparable with HiFi standalone CD players.
>
> If you talk about off-the-shelf products in the super market: yes, just 
> connect the analog audio out of the CD-ROM to your soundcard/soundchip 
> (typically the necessary cable comes with the CD-ROM) and use any decent 
> multimedia player (most of them are able to play CDs).

  - Some (most?) consumer sound cards will do 44100 -> 48000 upsampling, 
distorting sound.
  - I can't say anything about quality of DACs on low-cost sound cards.

>
> If you talk about really high quality stuff (which you don't get at every 
> corner on the street), I don't think so. But you can play with digital 
> extraction of the audio data from the CD and feeding it to an external DAC 
> via the SPDIF interface of the soundcard.

You should also check that sound card does not do resampling for sound 
streams from 44100Hz to 48000Hz (most common value). All emu10k-based 
sound cards DO resample ALL DSP inputs to 48kHz, even if you only need to 
send S/PDIF stream from CD S/PDIF to optical or coaxial S/PDIF output 
(I'm not shure are there any workarounds for this).

envy24-based cards (from ESI, like Maya44 mkII or Juli@) may work 44100Hz 
streams without resampling to 48kHz, but I don't know are they supported 
in FreeBSD. They come for a rasonable price around $150, stereo 
input/output (balanced/unblanced line-level & S/PDIF, depends on card) 
only.

And, of course, thare are "top" sound cards like Lynx Two, that will cost 
arounf $1500. Not supported on FreeBSD, as I know. For this card you will 
prefer to buy Mac or Windows :-(

Yuriy