USB sound card choice?

[james_s]

I've had a handful of occasions where I've wanted to digitize an audio signal, say from a vinyl record, reel to reel tape or other source and unfortunately portability is needed here and the laptops I have are severely lacking in terms of audio input, most having just a mono mic port. I'm looking for a decent USB sound card that has a proper line input. When I say "decent" I don't mean exotic woo-woo high end audiophool gear, I just mean something equivalent to a midrange PCI sound card in a desktop PC, a step up from the $2 generic Chinese things. Price range ideally <$50 but I'd consider going a bit higher for something that offered compelling advantages. Standard RC jacks for input would be ideal but phone jacks are acceptable too. Support in Linux is a requirement, Windows 7 x64 support nice to have too. Suggestions for a specific product to look for are welcome, either new or used is fine provided it's reasonably easy to find one.

[NiHaoMike]

Behringer makes some pretty good USB audio interfaces, but I'm pretty sure all the cheaper ones can only do 16 bit/48kHz.

[ve7xen]

The standard recommendation for a 'cheap but decent' USB sound card is the Behringer UCA202 or the nearly identical UFO202 and UCA222. It's only 16bit/48khz, but the analog performance is reasonable, and it's only $20 or on sale right now for $10 at Sweetwater. It's a UAC1 device, so works on pretty much anything with a USB host port. However word on the street is they've switched to a clone of the original TI all-in-one chip, and that performance is worse than before on the new units, though likely performance is still reasonable for casual use. YMMV, but for $10 I think it'd be hard to go wrong, though performance won't be incredible either way.

The next step up is a pretty big one to the Behringer UMC202HD (you will need 2 RCA -> 1/4" TRS cables) for about $80, with 24/192 and significantly better analog. Also bigger, more complicated, and with controls you probably don't need/want, but I'm not really aware of anything cheaper that offers good audio quality.

[james_s]

Isn't 16 bit/48kHz essentially CD quality? Like I said, I don't need audiophool grade stuff, I just want something roughly equivalent to a PCI sound card in a desktop PC. I'm not up to date on bitrates and such in digital audio.

[mansaxel]

16 bits at 48KHz is equivalent but not the same as CD.

CD has 44.1 KHz sample frequency.  I don't think there's a noticeable difference in this case.

48KHz is more common in pro gear, and if I'm not aiming at actual CD production, but only want to make bit-reduced files like Ogg or FLAC (or the more copyrighted ones like MP3) that's what I'd use.  Sound files can be sample rate converted, with only minimal loss, so no big issue.

The UCA202 can to both 44.1 and 48 (and 32KHz, should you want it, which you don't). A bit uncertain how sample rate is selected unless you have some publicised programming interface for such in the "standard USB audio" class.

The only thing I'm a bit concerned over is the bit depth, but as long as you get your gain structure right on the analog side (analog 0 dBm = -18dBFS in the digital domain is a good start) the 96dB range of 16 bits is probably OK.

[magic]

Isn't 16 bit/48kHz essentially CD quality? Like I said, I don't need audiophool grade stuff, I just want something roughly equivalent to a PCI sound card in a desktop PC. I'm not up to date on bitrates and such in digital audio.

It is.

But most PC soundcards (even intergated) are 192/24, so you your requirements are inconsistent
Truly high end stuff has to be 384/32

Anyway, back in the day, laptops often came with a couple re-tasking jacks that could be switched to either mic, line in or even surround if you were lucky. I know most everything in computing went down the shitter through the 2010s, are they not making them like that anymore too?

[BrianHG]

For audio out:

For headphones/desktop speakers and anything with a volume control, 48khz/16bit is plentiful.  This does not guarantee the sound quality output of the DAC.

If you want to use your PC volume control to drive a >=100watt amp directly which does not contain a volume control (IE: you are using your PC's volume control) and your speakers are in your face at least some of the time, then 48khz/24bit audio is worth it as such devices today are still cheap today.  Even my 5 year old laptop headphone output is 192Khz 24bit capable, and measured to be flat all the way past 50Khz at 'all' volumes.

Note that I have seen and heard cheap USB DACs smear/mute out the higher frequencies above 10khz with lower volume samples.  IE, muffled sound in the fine details getting progressively worse as you lower the volume.

For audio in:
Yes, if you are sampling vinyl, you want something better as when you choose to do post-processing, you will be able to generate a higher quality final 44.1k, 16bit final sample.  I would not choose a 2-50$ device here.  And many of the bottom end samplers which actually claim higher frequency and bitrates actually lie and interpolate the data coming in which was sampled barely at 44.1k/16bit quality at their core with such lousy SNR, I wouldn't even call them 14bit.

[james_s]

Well I suppose I could just drag my desktop PC into the other room and use that, I don't know if the onboard sound is any better than a $20 device but it has a separate line-in jack at least. I'd be encoding mp3, probably 128kbps, maybe 160 in some cases, this is not pristine high end media I want to archive, it's just some random old stuff that I want to preserve. It's strange that the inexpensive USB solutions are apparently not as capable as the desktop sound cards, I think the last time I bought a PCI sound card it was not even $50 but that was a long time ago. It's odd that there doesn't seem to be much between $20 and expensive pro gear.

[Miyuki]

But most PC soundcards (even intergated) are 192/24, so you your requirements are inconsistent
Truly high end stuff has to be 384/32

There is no way to sample 32 bit on an audio signal.
Even 24 bit is overkill in most cases. It is useful when you want to apply effects to have some room in digital space. But on the sampling side is the lower portion just a noise.
A common line-level signal is too close to the noise floor to use these resolutions.

[magic]

Sheeple don't know what SNR is but they know that more is better and 32 is more than 24.
One dedicated audiophool vendor even released a 64 bit DAC. I mean, there is no 64 bit material around, but all the internal filtering and processing of the 16~32 bit input is done in 64 bits to reduce rounding error.
It can be done.

[rsjsouza]

Creative labs had some USB adapters that were quite decent, even with phono inputs. I think this one was named Sound Blaster XFi HD.

Since you are in the US, it would be easy to find it on the used market.

[ve7xen]

Well I suppose I could just drag my desktop PC into the other room and use that, I don't know if the onboard sound is any better than a $20 device but it has a separate line-in jack at least. I'd be encoding mp3, probably 128kbps, maybe 160 in some cases, this is not pristine high end media I want to archive, it's just some random old stuff that I want to preserve. It's strange that the inexpensive USB solutions are apparently not as capable as the desktop sound cards, I think the last time I bought a PCI sound card it was not even $50 but that was a long time ago. It's odd that there doesn't seem to be much between $20 and expensive pro gear.

I think there's just not much market for sound cards of any sort any more. The average user will be using Bluetooth peripherals, or gizmos with their own built-in DAC/ADC (e.g. 'USB turntables'), so that really just leaves pro/semi-pro gear.

Feature wise, such simple USB cards aren't going to offer anything on top of an integrated sound card, but they will probably sound better. Very implementation dependent as the integrated DACs/ADCs themselves aren't terrible, but it's not free to implement audio well on a densely packed motherboard. So they tend to be quite noisy at best.

[David Hess]

I was considering Focusrite and I think a Behringer UMC202HD, which supports 24 bit at 192 kS/s, not long ago for an application like this, but the mentioned Bahringer less expensive UFO202 and similar look ideal.  I still have not forgiven Creative Labs for the Soundblaster Live; they cannot be trusted.

When I did this many many years ago, I used a Turtle Beach PCI sound card (16 bit at 48 kS/s) to record from Dolby HX C metal tapes and encoded to Lame 256 kb/s MP3 after using Sound Forge to remove background noise.  The results were excellent.

[David Hess]

I think there's just not much market for sound cards of any sort any more. The average user will be using Bluetooth peripherals, or gizmos with their own built-in DAC/ADC (e.g. 'USB turntables'), so that really just leaves pro/semi-pro gear.

My current external audio amplifier has an auxiliary Bluetooth input and I consider it useless for video or gaming where low latency is required.  It also occasionally skips.  In theory Bluetooth supports low latency, but based on experience now, I think getting it to work that way is a futile.  I could add an optical DAC to break the ground loop but as it is, the analog sound outputs from my motherboard have no discernible noise or distortion.

Feature wise, such simple USB cards aren't going to offer anything on top of an integrated sound card, but they will probably sound better. Very implementation dependent as the integrated DACs/ADCs themselves aren't terrible, but it's not free to implement audio well on a densely packed motherboard. So they tend to be quite noisy at best.

In many cases the sound card integrated into a PC motherboard will work fine for an application like this, but I would be less sanguine about a laptop and offhand I don't know of any laptops which have line level inputs.  I would have loved a good and cheap USB audio interface 25 years ago for a laptop.

You can read about various design compromises in the Focusrite and Behringer USB audio interfaces in some forums but they are irrelevant in all but the most exacting applications.

[mansaxel]

My current external audio amplifier has an auxiliary Bluetooth input and I consider it useless for video or gaming where low latency is required.  It also occasionally skips.  In theory Bluetooth supports low latency, but based on experience now, I think getting it to work that way is a futile.  I could add an optical DAC to break the ground loop but as it is, the analog sound outputs from my motherboard have no discernible noise or distortion.

I just added a Chinesium BT dongle to my multiroom stereo set-up. It's quite nice. But one uses it for playing back music from services like Spotify et c. For low-latency audio, analog still is king. Simply because low-latency digital is quite complicated to do right, especially if one involves a non-real-time multi-purpose operating system. Then it's only a question of how much time you lose. Not whether.

In many cases the sound card integrated into a PC motherboard will work fine for an application like this, but I would be less sanguine about a laptop and offhand I don't know of any laptops which have line level inputs.  I would have loved a good and cheap USB audio interface 25 years ago for a laptop.

You can read about various design compromises in the Focusrite and Behringer USB audio interfaces in some forums but they are irrelevant in all but the most exacting applications.

Indeed.

[james_s]

In many cases the sound card integrated into a PC motherboard will work fine for an application like this, but I would be less sanguine about a laptop and offhand I don't know of any laptops which have line level inputs.  I would have loved a good and cheap USB audio interface 25 years ago for a laptop.

That is exactly my problem, I want to be able to record to a laptop, and my laptops have only crappy mono inputs. The Behringer device looks like it will probably meet my needs and at only about $20 $10 I think I'll just buy one to try it out, it's got to be better than what's built into the laptops.