Do you guys have experience on sound cards on any Linux distro? I'm thinking of buying one to ditch my onboard sound.

If you have experience, please put in your sound card, the distro/version you use and what your experience is with it.

Thanks all!

I've got an Asus Xonar DS 7.1 card in my Ubuntu machine.

Worked straight out of the box, no special setup, and it's been working fine since 12.04/12.10 (can't quite remember when I first installed it).

Thanks. Going to shop around for sound cards available here too.

Also found that I had no troubles, on multiple Linuxes, with sound cards that used the EMU10K1 chip, such as the older Creative Soundblaster Live.

Where am I going to find those? LOL!

OK, Live's probably an old example, but you can still pick them up here and there.

I think you'll find that the Audigy is also powered by the same family, the EMU10K2 chip -- which is also supported under Linux.

I'm OK with my built in card really. The only problem I have is the missing mix device for ALSA which doesn't allow recording from the output stream (unless you physically connect output and input with a cable).

I looked at new Sound Blasters but they have very bad Linux support (basically useless).

I meant Sound Blaster Z.

Any specific reason for ditching the onboard audio?

Thanks for the input guys! Keep 'em coming.

I'm ditching my onboard audio because there's a glitch with the ALC888 alsa drivers that cuts out my desktop audio for specific games and Wine.

I've done a bit of research and the Asus Xonar DS is an old sound card. I think what could be available here are Asus Xonar DGX and DSX. Some others that I think may be available in shops here are, Creative Soundblaster VX, Audigy 7.1, Sound Blaster Z, SD X-Fi Xtreme Audio, Recon3D.

I need some help with untangling this, definitely! Ubuntu hardware? Why is it so hard to get the compatibility question answered?

From the post above, Sound Blaster Z is definitely out of the question.

Yeah, just take a look at this thread: http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=699670

May be things have changed lately, but I didn't see any better reports on it.

I still use the SoundBlaster Live! for all my Linux sound needs. Mostly because I've used it since forever and am somehow attached to it, but I also need a gameport occasionally and there's at least that. I also like that there's a hardware midi synthesizer in there and use it with dosbox games, although in all honesty software would probably do just as good a job and performance is hardly an issue anymore. But as much as I like it, it's not without its quirks.

There is a hardware bug that prevents you from loading soundfonts larger than 12M or so if you have more than 2G of memory. There are solutions for this, but not very good ones.

I've also noticed the signal having been inverted when recording (not audible, but significant in some contexts), and the line-in appears to switch channels!

I saw that thread and it's locked so it's not going to get any better reports. LOL!

I'll keep looking at the creative forums to see if I can find some reports for the other soundcards.

I also posted on askubuntu and it looks like they say I should stick with the ASUS Xonar cards.

This one recommends ASUS Xonar D2X, if I can find it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2221968&p=13014067#post13014067