Pro soundcards PCI>PCIx & linux adventure

[Steve]

Hi all,

Just feeling pleased with myself, I recently got lucky and found an EMU-1820m soundcard (with dock) on Facebook marketplace for £15. For those who don't know, Creative Labs used to release their 'professional' series hardware under the brand E-MU, the 1820m was the most advanced they ever made. Here is a link to a very thorough review of the product with all the specs.

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In the last 'few years' of owning PC's I've been relegated to the onboard sound since the quality became 'good enough', whereas in the 2000's I used to always have a dedicated sound card. Over the years I'd started to forget what a quality sound card sounded like. But of course there is the whole PCI / PCIx question. Inspired by this post I decided to order a PCI-PCIx converter and try my luck ... the other issue was drivers, I exclusively run Linux these days. After a bit of searching online apparently the card was still supported and all I had to do was install the alsa-firmware package from my distro's repo.

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I also needed to perform some repairs on the dock ... the headphone potentiometer had been damaged, completely tearing it off the PCB. Thanks to @rubber_jonnie for pointing me in the right direction, I asked on vintage-radio.net and they pointed me directly to a replacement for my pot (not sure why I couldn't find it! I did look!) I also had to replace some capacitors, quite a few inside the dock had started bulging and needed replacement. I replaced every large-sized cap on the mainboard (as these are often replaced after reading online forums) and quite a few caps on the audio-out daughterboard were also bulging, I replaced them too. I also decided to re-cap the main PCI sound card itself since I was on a roll.

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I then gave the PCI-PCIx converter a go, it was very tricky finding a way to mount the card in my very cramped case (due to a very large geforce 3080ti) But I secured it flat on-top of my PSU. I secured it using a thick piece of polystyrene between the card and PSU, just to make sure there was no electrical contact.

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And after loading the alsa-firmware into my Linux distro, guess what, it just bloody works doesn't it? I was amazed, I literally didn't need to make any changes to the configuration, it all just worked! A sound card from 2004. The sound quality is simply AMAZING. I would previously hear noise and humm due to my long-cable lengths going all the way down to my PC. This dock has a digital connection to the sound card via an RJ45 cable, so now all the digital to analogue conversion is happening right on my desk. This dock can output to my PC speakers and headphones simultaneously and they sound absolutely golden. Very happy :)

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[rubber_jonnie]

@Steve

Glad I could help out :)