I recently de-mothballed my old Soundblaster Z. It sounds light years better than the crappy onboard audio on my Dell, but only works properly with Windows. According to some Googling, the digital TOSLINK port does work with Linux, but I have no optical receivers, headphones or speakers. As a test, I ordered a cheap cable and converter ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007S6U7I4 ) but at that price point, I imagine whatever its using as a DAC sucks. Since it’s just to prove that I can get the Sound Blaster to work with Linux, that’s OK for now.
My question is will this thing produce decent sound quality? If not, can someone suggest a TOSLINK converter with a decent DAC?
SPDIF is a digital interface. The overall sound quality will be entirely determined by the DAC you do the conversion on externally.
Since you’d have to spring for a good external interface for this card to be a significant improvement anyway, I’d recommend just getting a class compliant USB interface instead of going through the trouble of finding a decent optical one, you’ll probably end up getting better value that way, and it frees up a PCIe slot
^and at that point it doesn’t matter what soundcard it’s coming from, since it passes the signal along without altering it (at least it’s not supposed to). So if your onboard has a toslink as well, then the souncard doesn’t matter. The soundblaster sounds better because it actually does the conversion to analog.
So the “receiver” works in Windows, but the digital output doesn’t work in Linux. In the meantime I’m using this old thing I pulled out of my spare parts:
While it does sound better than onboard audio, it leaves much to be desired. Any suggestions for a Linux-compatible DAC, USB or otherwise?
P.S. Why so much love for USB? Aren’t PCIe cards superior? My Sound Blaster certainly sounds better than any USB device I’ve ever heard. And the less desk clutter, the better.
No, because there’s interference inside a case that can lead to noise that you can’t control. An often seen phenomenon is when the GPU runs at really high FPS you get a kind of whine on the sound card. External DACs don’t have that interference and usually better shielding too.
absolutely not. you want the analog components as far away from the noise generated in your case as possible. This is a myth propogated from the times in PC building where the only onboard sound ou got was a beeper speaker and nothing could do cd PCM yet
As there’s no way to properly shield an internal card short of staking it to the ground lug of the PSU and building it in a massive RF can, literally any external interface, whether it’s firewire, usb, printer port, or optical is better than internal.
As for compatible interfaces, the focusrite scarlett usb2 interfaces work great, as do the midrange behringer and tascam usb devices.
Look for “class compliant” and USB2 as features and they’ll generally work well.