Riley Freeman Posted April 6, 2013 Share Posted April 6, 2013 I'm planning a new Snow Leopard build to use as a DAW and have been searching high and low for a motherboard (ATX or mATX) with a S/PDIF in header. My old 965P board had one and it worked great, but it seems to have fallen out of favour with newer chipsets. Failing this, is there a cheap PCI soundcard with working S/PDIF in? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.D. Posted April 7, 2013 Share Posted April 7, 2013 something I put together from newegg: You may be better off using either a PCIe card or an external s/pdif to usb sound card, depending upon what your needs are. If you just need 44.1Khz input, cheap solutions can be found all over the web. If you need something with 48/96Khz, or more pro audio gear type equipment, check out Juli@, E-Mu, or M-Audio. I used to use M-Audio, I curently have E-Mu and I have heard very good things about Juli@. Hope this helps some! You can also check out this thread for a discussion of some of the above listed audio gear... ... and out of curiosity, what DAW software are you using? I used to use Samplitude, but have switched to Audacity due to me being cheap and not liking where Magix has taken the once great Samplitude. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted April 7, 2013 Share Posted April 7, 2013 I'm not an audio geek, but have few coins to drop here External USB or PCI card would probably be a better solution. Creative Audigy 2 PCI does work with SL (KxDriver) and it has S/PDIF (coaxial) out. Although it doesn't have options to change bit depth and/or sampling rate. The other option is CREATIVE LIVE 5.1 EXTERNAL USB card. It has all the settings (via Audio-Midi Setup) and both Toslink/S/PDIF outs. No drivers needed in SL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted April 8, 2013 Share Posted April 8, 2013 He needs an input, not an output. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted April 8, 2013 Share Posted April 8, 2013 He needs an input, not an output. Oops! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riley Freeman Posted April 8, 2013 Author Share Posted April 8, 2013 Thanks for the link Mr. D, but those are all Ivy Bridge boards. I need Sandy so I can stay with 10.6. I could go the external USB route alright. It's mainly so I can feed digital audio out of my iPad into Garageband or Logic. For the iPad I'm looking at maybe the Behringer UCA202 to supply the digital out. The Juli@ card looks good, but a little overkill as I really only need the optical input (I have a NI Audio Kontrol 1 as my main interface). The E-MU 0404 PCIe card also looks nice but no OS X drivers. Assuming I'm not going to find such a board, I've started considering building a SB-E system (Asus P9X79 and a 3930k). It's a lot more expensive but for 10.6 it's probably the most powerful single-CPU system I could put together. Any thoughts on this are also welcome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.D. Posted April 8, 2013 Share Posted April 8, 2013 The E-Mu comes as an external USB option... that is what I use. The link I gave you should have directed you to the USB version which is supported on OS X: Why do you need sandy to stay with 10.6? My two OSX installation are both in Virtual Machines, so I'm not familiar with a limitation of the z77, h77 or h75 chipsets not working on Snow Leopard. I do know that all of those boards are backwards compatible with SandyBridge CPUs. If you must use a z67, h67 or h65 board (which by the way most z67 boards are BIOS flashable to support the IvyBridge CPU), you're gonna have to shop on ebay because those boards are the last generation and finding them new is hard - finding them new with top of the line bells-and-whistles like optical in are damn near impossible. And your willingness to jump to the x79 chipset also confuses me as that is the extreme edition version of the IvyBridge... A mister Rampage Dev would be able to help you more than anyone I know with regards to x79 systems. A good thread to get a hold of him would be here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riley Freeman Posted April 9, 2013 Author Share Posted April 9, 2013 Oh I found the USB E-MU as well, just didn't mention it as I already have a primary USB interface, so I wouldn't spend that sort of money just to add S/PDIF. From what I've read Snow Leopard won't run on a Z77. Whether that's because people were using them with Ivy Bridge chips I don't know. I haven't read of anyone trying a Z77 with a SB chip and 10.6. There does seem to be a flood of the Z77s though. Even the Z68s are getting thin on the ground, especially any non-ATX (originally I was going for mATX but couldn't find anyone stocking a Z68 one). The X79 is actually the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition (though it also supports Ivy). The reason for jumping on that bandwagon is for the 6-core i7 chips. The more power on hand the better If I had money to burn I could also go with a Xeon. But alas I don't. I think I'll have to give up on the onboard S/PDIF dream. A cheap USB should suffice when the time comes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.D. Posted April 9, 2013 Share Posted April 9, 2013 interesting - I didn't know the x79 was SB-E, but I found this page that explained to me the SB-E vs IB-E differences. ... and with regards to IvyBridge and Snow Leopard, check this out. Its possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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