[wshtb]

What would be a cheap usb + DAC combo that would produce OK sound on a noisy Linux workstation?

I spend lots of time everyday work on this Linux workstation, which is very noisy electrically speaking. From the $5 sound card I can hear hard drive seeking, video card refreshing, etc all through the headphone. It is driving me nuts.

 

[EnOYiN]

That kinda depends on what you consider cheap. You could try a Turtle beach audio USB soundcard. See here. I haven't used one myself so I can't really comment on the quality of their products. There are also several other options like the Meier Audio Move or iBasso or what have you. Those are about 3 to 4 times the price of the Turtle beach products though.

 

[Hybrys]

The Nuforce uDac is also an option and it's $100, so, not bad, and reviewed quite well.

 

[wshtb]

Thanks for recommending the Turtle Beach usb and Nuforce uDac. My only concern is both of them are powered by USB bus. The USB bus on that workstation could be very noisy.

I also looked at Musiland Monitor 2. It has its own power supply, but doesn't have hardware volume control. How hard would it be to build an inline volume control?

 

[Armaegis]

You can build a cmoy for something like $20-30. I believe there are even schematics for a DC powered one instead of battery.

If you have an exceedingly noisy machine, a good dac and/or amp may not fix that. Something to look into is a ground loop isolator ($20 from radio shack, $10 or less if you sniff around on ebay, but I've had quality issues with some of those) which is essentially an interconnect that you use after your dac.

So something like a Turtle Beach Micro + Cmoy + isolator should run you maybe $60 if you shop around.

 

[wshtb]

I already have a Cmoy. Will look into turtle beach USB plus ground isolator. Thannks!

 

[Armaegis]

Just as options, similar to the Micro are the Steelseries Siberia and the Terratec Aureon Dual (same form factor, same price). There are knockoffs that you can find on Amazon for something like $3, but they sound awful.

 

[a_recording]

Make sure that the DAC will actually work with Linux. I've heard that the Nuforce uDAC does not work so well. No noise over USB on my Mac though. (Whereas headphone out is a nightmare of noise, and another DAC picked up noise over USB.)

 

[Hybrys]

Usually HP out and USB out have no connection. Plus, workstation-class products classically use GREAT inputs, and terrible outputs. USB being often an input, I could see it being a high class set. I wouldn't forsee you having any noise problems.

On the note of linux, from the uDac thread:

"I'd like to get a udac to run on my T61 thinkpad running Ubuntu linux (8.04). I've searched Head-Fi, and seen several folks asking about this but no reports of success. I have seen people reporting success under Ubuntu with the Nuforce mobile. I sent a question to the sales group at Nuforce, and got a very prompt reply from Jason, who told me that the udac uses the same usb chip as the Nuforce mobile. So the success others have had with the Nuforce mobile should apply to the udac. But it would be very assuring for someone to tell us they have used the udac successfully under ubuntu."

"works fine under linux. plug it in and go."