High quality sound

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Yuriy Tsibizov <Yuriy.Tsibizov at gfk.ru> (Sat, 2 Sep 2006 10:45:05 +0400 (MSD)):

> 
> > 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.

I doubt the resampling will be noticed when compared to the DAC quality
and output amplifier sections (including "noise" from the CPU and other
parts of the system) of on-board chips. I have a "SoundBlaster Live!
USB" and the sound quality between the on-board sound of a laptop and
the USB audio device is a huuuuuuge difference.

> > 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.

Some are supported in -current. I need to get time to commit some
further support. This support will not be in 6.2.

Bye,
Alexander.

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