Cheap USB Soundcard please!

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bexamous

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 12, 2005
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Yay for ghetto rigging. DT770Pro + Zalman MIC + MIC arm broke off an old Sony headset + ziptie = PRICELESS.

New problem though is I have no PCI slots and am using real crappy onboard sound.

What is the cheapest USB sound card I should look at? All I need to connect is the headphones and the MIC, its a SFF gaming system. I have the 80ohm version and don't need a built in headphone amp or something.. current sound quality is good enough. I just don't want buzzing sounds when playing games.
 
heap c-media chip usb cards can be had for 20.00 online for name brands and less than 10.00 for no-name. i have a few (sell u one cheap lol) and they work well enough -the software drivers have eax2 and an eq

also- plz post a close up of the mic mounted to the headphones braket set up! i have the same mic and cans and want to imitate that!
 
Yeah if I had the money I'd get a emu usb card, but I'm broke atm. I think I'll get one of those cheapo $10 ones.... any difference between brands? I'm guessing only one factory makes them though. I'll get a higher quality usb card when I have more money and use the cheapo one at work, nothing goes to waste! yay.

Just one thing, with the super cheap usb sound cards, is there any buzzing or any noise from them? I'd keep on using onboard sound but there is all this background noise. Funny thing is when I'm on the desktop its silent, but if I open a game or do something CPU intensive it starts buzzing, and its not just a white noise that gets ignored, its really random sounds. Even worse is everyone on teamspeak hears it as well when I talk. I don't need good sound quality, right now I'm just looking to get rid of all the background noise. I'm assuming anything USB will do this. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

Also,

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There is another picture, not sure if its much better. Entire thing took 8 minutes to do. 4 minutes was first trying to cleany remove the mic arm from old headset and then giving up and using vise grips to break them apart and pull the mic arm out. If you see in the picture the black flexable arm has some light-grey colored plastic at the end... that was part of the headset. I couldn't break that off as the mic arm is glued to it.

Another 2 minutes was looking for a zip tie but once found it was easy. I lined up the mic arm along the metal part of the headphones and used one zip tie. Pulled it tight as possible and its not going anywhere.

The mic arm is actually a metal wire coiled up, sorta like a slinky. On the opposite side when I pulled off the old mic the slinky wire started to unwind. Not a big deal tho cause the Zalman mic covers it all up.

Only hard part of all this is locating a flexable wire or something to use as a mic arm. The Zalman mic will clip onto just about anything and you can find 1000 ways to attach a wire to the headphones.

Anyways its not pretty but it is very useful. Teamspeak works perfect (other than soundcard issues)... mic picks up my voice just fine where it is and doesn't need to be in my mouth to work, unlike old gaming headset.
 
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ok my attempt-just poking around the garage



next iwill try to find something flexible-such as a cable
 
Incase anyone ever searches this topic heres the results:

I got in the $4 USB Soundcard... and perhaps not surprisingly the quality leaves a little to be desired.

Two problems:
Headphone volume is INSANELY loud. I have both wave and master volume set below 1/10th and its still loud. There is tons of bass for some reason as well. Playing UT3 the bass is overwhelming the rest of the sound. Anyone who shoots rockets or something there is so much rumbling thats all I can hear.

The mic input that I really cared about... nonstop noise. With the onboard there is noise whenever I speak and everyone on teamspeak hears it, more annoying than anything. With the USB soundcard the noise is so loud teamspeak won't ever turn off. If I raise the threshold enough to stop the noise from transmitting all the time my voice isn't loud enough to activate it.

Sigh.

Oh well :) haha... lineout isn't really the end of the world, its just loud. But the MIC side is 100% worthless.

I'll have to make due with onboard sound until I can get a emu usb soundcard.
 
ok i tried my altec lansing one- i used the soundwave usb 7.1 driver from siig website- and i played ut3 :)
the sound is fine- not too loud at all- i tried the mic in teamspeak- didnt work until i selected the cmedia usb device in the options but then it was fine- i turned mic boost off btw
 
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