Category Archives: sound card

Fixing Linux Audio One Chipset at a Time

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Linux audio may be confusing for the uninitiated. As a system that has evolved and spawned at least two independent branches over time it tends to produce results that surprise or irritate the user. On the other hand it is open source software and thus can be fixed if you know what you do.

Over at reddit [rener2] was annoyed by the fact that listening to music on his laptop was a significantly worse experience under Linux than under Windows. Running Windows the output of  the headphone jack covered the whole spectrum while his Linux set up cut off the …read more

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Detecting Mobile Phone Transmissions With a Sound Card

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Anyone who had a cheap set of computer speakers in the early 2000s has heard it – the rhythmic dit-da-dit-dit of a GSM phone pinging a cell tower once an hour or so. [153armstrong] has a write up on how to capture this on your computer. 

It’s incredibly simple to do – simply plug in a set of headphone to the sound card’s microphone jack, leave a mobile phone nearby, hit record, and wait. The headphone wire acts as an antenna, and when the phone transmits, it induces a current in the wire, which is picked up by the soundcard. …read more

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A Reproduction Vintage Sound Card

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Before the AdLib sound card, sound on PCs was in a terrible shape. Since the dawn of IBM, all PCs included a speaker, but this PC speaker was only capable of sounding one note at a time. Chords on the PC speaker produced a weird ‘bubbling’ effect. Just a few years later, 8-bit sound could be created with the Covox Speech Thing, effectively a resistor ladder, with the parallel port on one side, and an 1/8″ plug on the other. These solutions for PC sound sucked.

It wasn’t until the first AdLib cards that superior sound showed up on the …read more

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