2 soundcards>>> any advantages?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kenny S
  • Start date Start date
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Kenny S

I have 1 pci card and one onboard card.
Both of them are installed and work.

What is the advantages of using 2 sound cards?

can I have inputs into both cards and hear the combined sound from the
output of one card?

Any special things I can do with this configuration?


TIA
 
Normally when you install a PCI sound card you disable the on-board sound
card. I can't see any advantage of having two soundcards enabled. I'm not
even sure if you can run two in paralell with each other without causeing a
conflict. I'd certainly disable the on-board one.
 
You may possess 2 sound cards, but the only one you are using is the one
your speakers are plugged into. Strongly suggest you go into System, select
the on-board sound chip and "disable in this configuration". This will avoid
any possible conflict that may arise in the future.

You can also try to disable it in BIOS, though in my case this did not work
(it still showed up in Device Manager, so is now disabled in there, in my
configuration).

Hope this helps - Len
 
John said:
Normally when you install a PCI sound card you disable the on-board sound
card. I can't see any advantage of having two soundcards enabled. I'm not
even sure if you can run two in paralell with each other without causeing a
conflict. I'd certainly disable the on-board one.
Click to expand...

I've run two sound cards in several machines since Win98 without any
problem at all. It's no big deal as long as there are no i/o port or irq
conflicts and with modern MBs and Windows irqs are shared usually
without incident. There are advantages depending on the cards and their
capabilities and what you want to do. For example, I have used and use
an SB Live! card for the soundfont and mdid functions and a Crystal Wave
card for line recording because it has better a/d converters than the SB
card has.

Steve
 
Yabbadoo said:
You may possess 2 sound cards, but the only one you are using is the one
your speakers are plugged into. Strongly suggest you go into System, select
the on-board sound chip and "disable in this configuration". This will avoid
any possible conflict that may arise in the future.
Click to expand...

Actually, if they're working, this can cause more problems
that it will cure. Your mixers can get confused, and there
will be forever an ugly yellow exclamation mark in Device
Manager. The system resources allocated to the card will NOT
be freed up for use by any other hardware by telling DM not
to use the card. My suggestion>>leave things alone.

I have run the equivalent of 2 soundcards for years (one of them
is a part of my Videum video capture card) with no problems
whatsoever. It only becomes a problem *IF* they are identical,
and the driver was NOT specifically written to support this.

I am able to record and/or play back simultaneously on both
of them, but have no real need to do so.
 
Yabbadoo said:
You may possess 2 sound cards, but the only one you are using is the one
your speakers are plugged into. Strongly suggest you go into System, select
the on-board sound chip and "disable in this configuration". This will avoid
any possible conflict that may arise in the future.

You can also try to disable it in BIOS, though in my case this did not work
(it still showed up in Device Manager, so is now disabled in there, in my
configuration).

Hope this helps - Len
Click to expand...

If they both work then why change anything? I strongly suggest if it
ain't broke don't fix it. Who knows why the OP wants two sound cards and
why should anyone care if there's no problem? If as the OP says, they
both work then what's the big deal?

I've used two sound cards for my own reasons for years and with various
Windows versions and motherboards. Never had a problem.

Steve
 
Windows XP supports up to 3 soundcards and they can be multichannel ones
so that you can have up to 32 channels of sound recording. These are used
for
studios and telephony recordings.

I am just new to this and the info on google is not so practical, thats why
I
posted here to see if anyone has experience with this.

I have also 2 tv cards and I want to try sending the sound from each tv
tuner
to a different sound card. I use one to encode video and stream it and the
other to
watch tv.

So I want to try to keep their sound outputs separate...

kenny
 
Kenny said:
Windows XP supports up to 3 soundcards and they can be multichannel ones
so that you can have up to 32 channels of sound recording. These are used
for
studios and telephony recordings.

I am just new to this and the info on google is not so practical, thats why
I
posted here to see if anyone has experience with this.

I have also 2 tv cards and I want to try sending the sound from each tv
tuner
to a different sound card. I use one to encode video and stream it and the
other to
watch tv.

So I want to try to keep their sound outputs separate...

kenny
Click to expand...

I have no experience with TV cards but suspect this may be software
dependant.

Steve
 
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