Does anybody know if the USB Audio device in the 990 works with Linux? I'm currently looking at several private sales and auctions for a 990 and I'm tempted. I built a computer for the media room running Linux (streaming audio, myth tv, etc) and it would be nice if I could just plug the 990 into the computer's USB port and access it as an audio device.

I use Linux and I have a 990, but computers and 990 are not close enough to one another to try that. The ALSA web site says that any USB device that is standards compliant will work, and I expect the 990 is. The 990 manual certainly doesn't specify Windows or mention any computer limitations. The ALSA web site also tells how to build a generic USB driver.

One thing the 990 manual does say is that the USB audio connection is stereo audio only. You can not send Dolby or DTS Digital over USB for decoding. The manual also says that audio input through the USB port will not be presented to the digital outputs, either coax or optical. I've never tried using USB for an audio connection from the computer. You can get a 5.1 sound card for Linux starting under $20, and I currently feed my computer audio through a sound card to a Sony receiver. I've found cards with CMedia chipsets work great with Linux.

Hope this helps.

Bill

The advantage of using the USB port as a sound card device for my computer would be in not having to use an analog audio cable between the computer and the 990. IF the DAC's in the 990 are better than those in the compute sound card that would be another advantage. I don't need surround sound output from the computer, this would be only for playing MP3/Ogg files or watching YouTube videos or listening to internet radio, etc. The computer I'm using is an el-cheapo anyway.

BTW, I don't yet own the 990, but I'm considering getting one if a good buy shows up in a used one.

The DAC's in the 990 will undoubtedly be better than most computer sound cards. You could probably use a card with a digital output, but the USB is a cheap and simple way to go. Linux has actually been more plug and play for me than Windows, so I'd be surprised if the 990 did not work as a Linux USB sound device.

I have been using the 990 with my Linux home theater PC for a couple of years. I am currently using Ubuntu. In earlier versions of the distribution I had to create a symbolic link /dev/sound/dsp to point to /dev/dsp1 (if I remember correctly). This was annoying because I had to recreate the link after each boot due to udev rules in the system that did not allow permanent symlinks in /dev. Since it was easier than messing with udev rules, I appended the onle-line command (ln -s /dev/dsp1 /dev/sound/dsp) to one of the bootup scripts in /etc/init.d.

In the recent releases of the Ubuntu distro, I have had no such problem - everything worked out of the box, although I still have to tweak some programs to point to the proper device (e.g. MythTV).

If you are not getting any sound, first try a program such as Amarok or VLC that will let you specify advance configuration options and go to the sound configuration section and specify the USB audio device manually (try /dev/dsp, /dev/audio, /dev/sound, etc.) to whatever you think your system is using for USB audio.

By the way, the sound is awesome.

Ubuntu 9.04 has been working flawlessly on my 18 month old laptop...and was indeed more "plug and play" and simple to install than the windows "rescue disk" when my hard drive failed. So I stuck with it.

As far as using the USB audio device, I agree with the other poster who suggested to simply use a sound card with a digital output (coax or TOSlink). There are a number of incredibly cheap ones available and most integrated sound cards on modern motherboards include a digital output as well. I never tried using the 990 as a USB sound device. The instructions in the 990 manual were rather spartan as I recall.

Best,

The process of using the USB input is straightforward enough (assign the USB digital input to an input just as you would use coaxial or optical, then plug the USB cable in at both ends). The USB port does have some limitations (namely inability to pass a Dolby Digital or DTS bitstream) that may make a coaxial or optical connection preferable, depending on what you want to do with the computer audio source. Certainly a HTPC setup playing movies should go to coaxial or optical.