I had major cabling concerns for live Linux audio. I wore out my PC’s front panel 1/8″ stereo jack in six weeks!, and I didn’t want to keep on buying sound cards at that rate. So I did a lot of searching.
I found lots of USB hardware with XLR and 1/4″ jacks; but USB adds latency (MIDI response delay). Similar Firewire devices are often recommended, but they are generally expensive, and the configuration needs are reportedly slightly arcane. Eventually a friend of mine recommended RCA jacks. RCA jacks can take a lot of hookup/remove cycles, and they are very firm, they don’t tend to give static when jiggled. I thought of the hifi-home-stereo-component-PC market, and started to look for PCI and PCI-E sound cards with RCA jacks. It turns out that almost every major make of sound card makes at least one with RCA jacks for output. Sometimes the web-published literature doesn’t even mention it, but they’re there.
So then the problem was, which one? Most of the RCA-jack-laden cards are quite expensive. I searched for and found lots of web-reports, and eventually found that the Audiotrak Prodigy HD2, a PCI card, is often recommended. I was able to buy one for less than US$100, tried it. Definitely recommendable; I have been using it since 10/2009. Its s/n ratio is wonderful, performance excellent, visual manufacturing quality (to this ex-electronics-hobbyist) astonishing, at least this particular one is!
I bought it here.
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