$36 USB Sound Box

[jwilson56]

Well I bought one off Ebay and it went up in smoke in 2 days.... I had to send it back to Hong Kong. Not fun... so I went with a M-Audio Delta 410 card and have not regreted it a bit. Media Center will use that card and give you 5 independant zones. If your looking for a good USB device then go with the Xitel Pro HI-FI Link. The cables alone are worth what you will pay for it. It comes with 3 30 foot cables. One TOS, one digital coax and 1 a high quality pair of RCA.

John

[kellebr]

John,

Does a single instance of JR Media center support 5 different streams of audio simultaneously? If so, does NetRemote support this functionality as well?

[Stevech]

I'd like to find a $36 ethernet sound player!

[jrfuda]

I ended buying a Griffin iMic USB audio device. It works great. I'm using it for TTS and VR. I built a new PC and the mobo has built-in audio (Soundstorm, supposed to be the best mobo audio around, rivaling audigy PCI) and use it's SPDIF out for JR Media Center, which works great as well.

I did notice, though, that when a TTS announcement played while I was listening to music, the music would occasionally stutter, I fixed this by increasing the buffering to .5 seconds in JRMC (although it still happens occasionally).

Those of you that are running multiple zones on JRMC, do you ever experience stuttering, or is my experience unique?

[fireball]

I've been running a Creative MP3+ for going on a year now and love it. Its got RCA and SPDIF in's & out's and works perfectly. Not real sure what the load on my USB bus is though I'm pretty sure its kind of high on 1.1. I picked it up for $40 at Circuit City and have seen them priced the same all over the place, even Wal-Mart.