Low audio output quality with USB sound card

[fellowweb]

Hi everyone,

 

This is my first. Being new to this forum, I have used the search engine and came across the post "[How To] Solutions for Audio Problems, A Compilation":

 

Audio

 

This is a compilation of many of the different audio solutions available. It is not exhaustive. If you don't find what you want, search for it.

 

(...)

 

Misc information

USB Soundsticks

- very

inexpensive

USB sticks can be purchased for less than $10(US) to provide

multichannel-sound out and microphone-sound in

. One place to find these is on the eBay site by searching for "usb 5.1 audio". A higher quality device is the "Turtle Beach Audio Advantage" available in stores for about $35(US). All of these devices work very well when you have no other sound-out or sound-in solutions.

 

I want to use exactly one of those simple USB sound cards with my Mac mini in order to be able to switch between audio out via internal loudspeaker and via the hifi station (connected to the USB sound card) with the help of SoundSource. However, the audio output's quality is far inferior to the Mac mini's audio out directly linked to my hifi station. Everything sounds like a heavily compressed low-quality MP3 played via overburdened loudspeakers.

 

To fix this problem, I came across this tip on macosxhints.com: They traced the low audio quality on a Macbook back to the internal sound card's 16-bit setting. Switching to 24-bit should help.

 

Whereas the Mac mini's internal sound card is set to 24-bit, my external USB sound card is also set up to use 16-bit. Within Apple's utility Audio MIDI Setup 16-bit is the only option in the respective dropdown menu. It does not offer 24-bit at all:

 

 

Is anyone aware of a Mac driver which might provide superior audio quality? Does my problem at all relate to the 16-bit vs 24-bit issue?

 

I have the impression that the people over here are extremely experienced with respect to hardware issues on a Mac. Therefore I would highly appreciate your help even though I am not running a hackintosh - yet.

 

Additionaly, I looked at the OSx86 Wiki (here and here). But I don't think that the audio devices listed there match with mine.

 

System Profiler lists my USB Audio as follows:

Product ID: 0xf211

Vendor ID: 0x1130 (Tenx Technology, Inc.)

Version: 1.0b

Speed: up to 12 MBit/s

Location ID: 0x26440000