USB audio devices (external D/A for your computer)

I've been pondering this for a while. The built-in headphone jack and such in my laptop suck. Likewise, it would be nice to have an easy way to capture audio from my TiVo and get it into the computer and to digitize old tapes and records with high fidelity.

Solution? I've all but settled on an Onkyo SE-U55. Original list price was $249 but J&R Music World seems to strangely have them for $69.88, making them about half the cost of competing boxes.

It's got optical and coax digital I/O and RCA jacks for analog I/O, plus headphone and microphone port. This makes it basically the perfect box for DJing from a laptop, or dragging a laptop over to the TiVo for direct digital audio dumps.

Given the price, I suspect a close-out or some other deal that may not last. Get yours now...

Yes, at that price I would jump on it. It looks great... I've got a soundblaster extigy wich is the same idea. USB sucks for audio, but laptop sound cards suck even more for audio. The extigy has onboard dolby 5.1 decoding and 5.1 output, so it might have a few more features. I would expect the Onkyo would be higher quality than soundblaster circuit city level stuff. It's definitly worth the $70... You've got me considering one, and I don't even know what I'd do with it.

Matthew

Do you have a link?

J&R
C|Net

Sorry for not posting links sooner... I found the deal pretty late last night in a fit of "geez, I just don't have enough electronic crap at home"

Onkyo's page for the SE-U55

J & R's page

The only issue with this box (and all the boxes in the same category) seems to be how you drive them. There's something called ASIO, which some fancier sound cards support. It's not clear to me whether this is in the slightest bit necessary, but there it is.

One of my motivations for this gizmo is to turn my laptop into a serious DJing machine (internal sound card to cue the next song, external sound box to drive the real speakers). I spent hours last night chewing through all the different DJ packages, and it's just amazing how loonie some of these things get.

SInce I have no need to beat match or cross-fade, I'm tempted to just run two instances of WinAmp, even though it's not potentially as useful as BPM Studio, which I'm mostly only interested in for its database capabilities. I need to spend more time poking around that list to see if somebody's built the right package for me. You need the "pro" version of BPM Studio if you want to support two sound cards at once, at that's around $400, which seems silly.

*sigh*

With two Winamps running, will you run into low processing headroom and skips?

I want to use this for DJ'ing too... I use my empeg now, but sometimes I use the empeg AND the laptop.. I guess with this, and HiJack I could have both ...

There are some cool winamp plugins you may want to look at that will crossfade between 2 instances to winamp IIRC.

Can someone explain to me why anyone would need two instances of Winamp running in order to do any sort of DJing? All you need to to crassfade is one instance open with the appropriate plugin, so why go to all the trouble? Just curious.

Real DJ's often play two records on top of one another (figuretively speaking) for more controll than just the typical crossfade. Like when a DJ "teases" with bits of the next song a few times before taking it.

That makes sense. I guess for my partues I just like the automation version of the crossfade. A simple progression to the next song is all I need

Can someone explain to me why anyone would need two instances of Winamp running in order to do any sort of DJing?

It's not about cross-fading. It's about wondering "gee, what should I play next?" You want to be able to listen to one thing on your headphones while something else is going out the big speakers. Fundamentally, that either requires two sound cards, or at least one card with more than two channels.

With this device, could you send one winamp to the usb device and one to the soundcard for you headphones?

Yup, Winamp lets you run multiple instances simultaneously and configure each one to use a different sound card. As far as I can tell, there's no easy way to make it all happen with a single click, but it is possible.

In reply to:

---

You need the "pro" version of BPM Studio if you want to support two sound cards at once, at that's around $400, which seems silly.

---

Or you could get MixMeister Pro, which has a much more intuitive interface and is cheaper to boot. I'm using the non-Pro version now and it's so much easier than either mixing in CEP or using two versions of WinAmp...

Have fun,

Paul

Does MixMeister support dual sound cards? if so, then $39 is definitely a good price.

How does the Extigy work? I've always had my doubts about the "higher end" USB audio devices like it , due to the limited USB bandwith. How well does the mouse still work if your playing a 5.1 stream for example?

Of course the box saying "Creative" is one thing that will keep me away anyhow. I've been Creative free since 1995 when I grabbed a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus over an AWE 32.

In reply to:

---

Does MixMeister support dual sound cards? if so, then $39 is definitely a good price.

---

I believe MixMeister Pro does. It's more expensive (at, from memory, $120US), but it does all the things you expect to do with a live DJ setup (preview one point while playing another, and other features) for much less than the other product mentioned here.

Have fun,

Paul

Of course the box saying "Creative" is one thing that will keep me away anyhow. I've been Creative free since 1995 when I grabbed a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus over an AWE 32.

For me it has been the opposite. I've had to work with Creative ever since Gravis decided not to extend their UltraSound line of soundcards once the windows '95 era began. Sure, they tried with the ultrasound PNP, but that card really didn't cut it.
Damn, I loved my GUS (max) card. Probably the best soundcard I've ever owned. (not taking into acount modern frills like digital IO, but purely based on sound quality)

It works fairly well. I've been verry happy with it as an alternative to built in laptop sound cards. I doesn't seem to lag the mouse on my 900mhz celery. It does blip every once in a while when you start a program or the computer hangs, which is annoying.

Basicaly, if you've got a desktop replacement laptop, it's a great way to get decent sound out of it. I bought the 5.1 klipsch promedias and was dieing with my laptop sound card. If you've got a desktop, buy a real sound card instead...

Mattew

My personal opponion is that any desktop replacement laptop would come with a decent sound card in the first place. My Solo 9300 did, complete with 5.1 optical out for sound, or coxial off the dock.

Of course many laptop makers don't share this particular view...