USB Soundcards

[robwriter]

Realising that Pi may not be great at audio to start with, I got a cheap USB soundcard off eBay. A bit like the ones at http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/32083392 ... sbar&cbt=y.

Just wondering if anyone has used anything similar and if it works out of the box, and if they provide more stability?

One of the projects I'd like to pursue is building an standalone internet radio with the Pi, so getting decent sound is fairly important, and this comes with volume buttons for free!

[XiS]

My experience with these cheap usb soundcards is that they have terrible audio quality. I bought 3 different kinds on DealExtreme once, those were pretty close to the price of your card, and none of them had decent audio. Heck, I think the quality of the PWM audio from the RaspPi may even sound better then those things.

I myself am trying to build a similar system based on MPD and forgot that I didn't have a HDMI input on my receiver, so I have to get it to work another way. I didn't really plan to buy a new receiver just to let my Pi run on it with decent quality sound so I think I'll try the USB soundcards again. I was thinking of something like Aureon Dual USB (€ 26) or Soundblaster Play (€ 25). But I'm not really sure how they would sound and if they're pretty easy to get up and running.

Does anyone know if this is going to work and worth it?

[robwriter]

Quick update. Got my Pi last week, but haven't had much time to play. Did try to plug the soundcard I bought in and playing an MP3 through VLC resulted in around 12 seconds of audio, followed by a similar amount of nothing, followed by 12 seconds of audio, and so on.

I'll try to do some digging this week to work out whats going wrong and see if its fixable.

However, the sound quality seemed fine when output (via the headphone socket) to my receiver. Probably nowhere near CD quality but I'll make that call once I've worked out whether the speakers I can squeeze in to my radio make better sound quality worthwhile.,

I also tried the Pi's headphone out socket. Apart from it not playing properly in most media players, when it does play I didn't find the quality too bad.