UA-20 impressions [Was: [Alsa-user] M-Audio Quattro/Duo question]

[Frank B. <fb...@fo...>]

Hallo John,
John Bleichert hat gesagt: // John Bleichert wrote:

> Thanks for the comments. I look forward to hearing your review of the 
> UA-20. I'd been looking at those, too, and on Edirol's website I found a 
> blurb about supported USB controllers:

The device did arrive, and now here are my very, very first impressions: 

It is small. Good. 
Plasic. I can live with that. 

I plugged it in, configured the modules as usual, did
"/etc/init.de/alsa restart" and voila: "cat /proc/asound/cards" showed
it. I started alsamixer, but it found no mixer controls, as didn't
amixer. So this box doesn't have outgoing volume controls!  What a
relief compared to the thousands of controls in the SB mixer ;)

I couldn't hear anything at first, so I suspected it was the missing
mixers' fault, but then I played a bit with the switches on the UA-20
and after another "/etc/init.de/alsa restart" sound came out of my
speakers. I needed to set the "Advanced Driver" switch to "off" I
guess.  This switch seems to be responsible for the sample format. I
need to check this at the weekend. 

Because I encountered a nasty power-supply buzzing loop between my amp
and the notebook, I didn't test midi etc. yet. With another amplifier
in my friends room I found the audio quality while playing quite
convincing, but this amp has rather low end speakers. 

So apart from the alsamixer irritation installation was a real plug
and play experience. No firmware hassles, too.

Congratulation and many thanks, dear ALSA developers, for your work on
making USB audio apparently a lot easier to setup than on Windows/Mac
(read rec.audio.pro for frightening stories from dll-hell ;)

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__