[Jayce]

There comes a time in every technology-enthusiasts life that they seriously want to consider walking away from computers for good. This is one of those times for me.

I read a lot about the Turtle Beach cards, particularly the Riviera 5.1 and Montego 7.1. I read they were both supported out of box, and heard a lot of uplifting reviews.

I received my Montego 7.1 today. 62 dollars shipped. Money that I thought would be well spent. As of now, I won't comment further on that.

I turned the computer off. Put the card in. Booted up to Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit. I had audio. Great. I was happy. I unmuted every option in alsamixer and maxed out PCM and master volume to see how it handled when maxed out. Oddly enough, the max volume didn't seem to be up to par with the onboard audio, strangely enough. So, I decided, hey let's re-enable my onboard card and compare! After I did that, things just got fked up. I would boot up in Ubuntu... select sys-pref-sounds to select my onboard card as the mixer, and the sound window would freeze. hm, wtf? Out of curiosity, tried to open synaptic. Froze. K. Grr... Kept happening.

I got so fed up, I reinstalled. Granted, I didn't format my home dir, but I doubt any critical settings were stored in hidden directories there that would later effect my issues.

Then I got my sound card to work again. Oops. Still the max volume not-up-to-par thing. So now, I'm at a loss.

The thing that really ****es me off is I had a SIIG SoundWave 7.1 sound card. It has a C-Media chipset, 96khz playback, 24 bit PCI card, blah blah. This Turtle Beach Montego is 100% identical. So why the sudden drop?

Who knows, maybe for some reason I magically lost my hearing today. Maybe tomorrow it'll be blazingly loud to me. But I just expected more out of it, and also I didn't understand why I had the random applications locking up (or not even loading in the first place) after putting the card in.

So much for it working out of box for me... more like it needed a fresh OS install. But who knows, I may have had some qwirky Alsa settings from before.

Any input?

[Jayce]

Solved.

I installed Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit out of curiosity reasons... and I didn't realize how profound of an impact 64 bit over 32 bit would have in terms of support with sound. It just never occured to me.

In 64 bit, on the SIIG SoundWave 7.1 PCI card I had, applications froze... primarily anything music related, such as Amarok and Frostwire. Also, my sound preferences was a bear to open. Majority of the time, it would load halfway, and just not finish loading the buttons and whatnot. These results I got with the SIIG and my Turtle Beach Montego 7.1 PCI. I returned the SIIG thinking maybe it was unsupported, but later on I heard someone on Ubuntu Forums announce their's works out of box 100%. Guess they were running 32 bit.

Granted, 64 bit and 32 bit Ubuntu are pretty much identical... I was only on 64 bit out of curiosity reasons, and due to that it slipped my mind. Once I installed 32 bit, everything worked fine.

QUESTION: Can anybody link me to some sort of documentation as to what the status is of Alsa and their 64 bit support? I'm curious to know how far along it is, because both sound cards did work... it's just they had qwirky issues that suggested that the setup isn't stable yet.