[SOLVED] How to achieve the best sound quality with USB DAC?

I want to take full advantage of my hardware. However, I'm having trouble understanding what settings I need to configure. I've spent several hours reading through wikis and searching online. Ultimately, I'm trying to achieve the highest quality audio output in stereo that's possible with my setup. USB > Behringer UAC202 > RCA out > Audioengine A2
I've had this DAC working for a couple of weeks, but I noticed that MPD was still eating a lot of CPU cycles upsampling music from 44.1 to 48khz. As I looked into it, it seems that this is unavoidable with ALSA, so I need to use OSS. Is that true? There's some conflicting ideas about when it's necessary to use OSS. I'm not using any legacy applications or old hardware. The "Hardware mixing" section in the ALSA wiki is pretty sparse.
I want all sound to go through the DAC, so I disabled all of the sound options in the BIOS (HDAudio and HDMI audio). I shouldn't need those enabled, right? (What's strange is that ALSA no longer wants to load without them.) I've added the OSS daemon and it starts, but I still don't have any sound in KDE. It no longer offers the "USB Audio CODEC" option. I'm ok with no system sound for now, if I can get MPD working.
/etc/mpd.conf contains:
audio_output {
type "oss"
name "UCA202"
device "/dev/oss/usb08bb2902-1/pcm0"
format "44100:16:2" # optional
mixer_device "/dev/mixer"
MPD is still starting as the root user. (I know, I should change that)
The daemon starts, but trying to play any track results in the following error in /var/log/mpd/mpd.log:
May 21 10:46 : output: "UCA202" [oss] failed to play: Write error on /dev/oss/usb08bb2902-1/pcm0: Input/output error
So... any help would be appreciated. Maybe, first of all, do I need to use OSS or should I switch back to alsa? Or maybe something else like jack?
*******EDIT*******
ALSA was the correct choice. The simple solution was to create /etc/asound.conf containing:
pcm.!default{
type rate
slave{
pcm "plughw:0,0"
rate 44100
Then change the audio output settings in mpd.conf to:
audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "MPD ALSA"
device "hw:0,0"
mixer_control "PCM"
With these settings the DAC receives 44.1khz audio and no upmixing occurs. Only one application can make audio output at a time. MPD uses much less CPU.
Last edited by ioos (2012-05-24 23:34:51)

Pajaro wrote:
For good sound quality, flat response is the most important thing. Take a look at qloud, http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=34412, and find yourself a very good microphone.
Then you will probably want to set a global equalizer for your machine. You can try with alsa, http://krustev.net/w/articles/Global_eq … _for_ALSA/.
If ALSA isn't finegrained enough, jack has a lot more flexibility, except for the fact that it doesn't allow you to set default output device, so you will need a helper application to redirect all output connections to your equalizer.
Well, i would say this is quite subjective. Untouched signal is superior to any equalized sound in my opinion, but i know this debate is never satisfying

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[SOLVED] How to achieve the best sound quality with USB DAC?

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