USB Headphones

[Smak]

Often the analog outputs on the front of cases sound like crap through good headphones. A good USB adapter with a nice DAC can make a big difference. And when I'm playing multiplayer games online, I like the voice chat to show up in my headset, but have the game sounds on the speakers.

Smak: Before you give up on it, an easy way to check out the device is to boot a Knoppix CD and try it from linux. It doesn't modify anything on your hard drive, and I'll help walk you through it if you want.

Knoppix CD???? I'm willing to give it a try.

 

[the maddman]

Alright, the first thing to do is to get a copy of Knoppix and burn it to a CD. If you are comfortable with BitTorrent, that's how I usally get my Knoppix isos, but you can use a mirror close to you.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

Download KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso and burn it to a CD. This will take a while, it's 650+ meg.

Now the really cool thing about Knoppix is that it will boot and run off the CD and does a good job of autodetecting your hardware. Just hit "Enter" at the splash screen to boot into Knoppix, it'll do it's thing and eventually you will get to a GUI desktop.

Once it's all booted, plug in your USB audio adapter, and watch to see if the computer does anything.
Then click on the little monitor on the task bar to open up Konsole (a command prompt) and type:
dmesg<hit enter>

Unix style systems are case sensitive, so don't capitalize the command. Down at the bottom of all the messages should be a few lines that start with "usb". When I plug a memory card into my laptop running Knoppix I get:

usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

If you don't see anything at the bottom of the dmesg log, that USB device is dead. When I get home from work I will try a USB audio adapter in Knoppix to see what happens.

And now if you were ever curious about Linux, you now have a easy to play with setup you can't hurt. Just reboot and everything is back to normal.

 

[Smak]

You're a star dude thanks, will give this a try.

 

[the maddman]

Not a problem. Knoppix is a great tool, even if you don't know Linux much, it gives you read only access to hard drives, I use it all the time to recover documents from machines infected with so much spyware they won't boot anymore.

If you need anymore help, just let me know, I'll keep an eye on this thread.