Sound Card Table
Generic LP-PAN Sound Card Installation & Checkout for any SDR
Eliminating Images
System Optimization for Streaming Audio
Comparison of sound cards to USB dongles

192kHz cards...

The winners in terms of performace are the Asus Xonar U5 & U7, but they have been plagued by failures at the 1 year mark. These appear to be driver/firmware related. Asus recently released a U7 MKII, but the jury's out on it's reliability, and some users have reported difficulty installing the drivers. I plan to purchase one to work out the installation issues and post a procedure.

A close 2nd is the Behringer UMC202HD USB sound card. It currently costs $56 at Amazon. It has a lot of good things going for it. Solid construction, all metal case, excellent drivers and easy setup, although the instruction manual is not very useful. It is inexpensive and has a great warranty (on paper, anyway). The noise floor is a few dB worse than the Asus cards, but from a practical standpoint, that's a minor issue. I plan to post installation and setup instructions for this soon.

96kHz cards...

Don't count out 96kHz cards. Most band segments fit within this bandwidth. They are a little cheaper than the Asus USB cards if you prefer an internal card. They typically use fewer PC resources as well. The best choices here are the Asus Xonar DSX PCIe and the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI. The AP2496 may be hard to find.

I recently tested an M-Audio M-Track 2x2 C-Series USB card. It tested well and was easy to install. It's well built and M-Audio has a solid reputration in the pro-audio world. The inputs are a little unorthodox for our use because you have to use a line input for one channel and an instrument input for the other, but they use the same connectors (1/4" mono).



Sound card table:
This table shows cards which have been tested here. All tests were run with an HP-8657A signal generator feeding a K3 with preamp ON. The K3 IF output is fed to LP-PAN w/preamp (similar to LP-PAN 2). All measurements are made through Windows Mixer (MME driver) except the additional numbers for the 1212m with ASIO driver.  In general, MME provides the best OS compatibility and allows sharing of the audio stream with multiple apps at the same time.

With this setup, the maximum signal from the generator is approx. -12dBm (S9 + 60dB) before LP-PAN and sound card clipping using the Windows Mixer settings in the ballpark levels table further down this page. The dynamic range is the difference between the noise floor and -12dBm.

Green... recommended and in production.
Gray... recommended with caveats. In production.
Yellow... recommended, but out of production. Check eBay.
Red... not recommended

	Noise Floor: Center / Edges	Dynamic Range	Cost New	Production Status	Windows 7 64-bit Compatibility
Up to 192 kHz
Behringer UMC202HD USB See Note 14	-130 / -128 dBm	112 dB	$56 (Amazon)	In Production	Drivers for all Windows up thru 10.
Asus Xonar U7 USB See note 11.	-131 / -126 dBm	118 dB	$80	In production	Driver support for all modern Windows thru 10.
Asus Xonar U5 USB See note 11	-130 / -126 dBm	119 dB	$65	In production	Driver support for all modern Windows thru 10. Does not support XP.
Realtek ALC8xx or 11xx 8ch HD Audio motherboard sound system	-128 / -118 dBm	116 dB	Built in	In Production	Compatible with MME / WDM. No ASIO driver
AimPro AS372N USB (Sewell SoundBox Pro) (SIIG CE-S70011-S1) See note 12. .	-134 / -126 dBm SoundBox Pro tested, but all three appear to be the AS372N.	118dB	$65 - $75	In Production	Driver support for all modern Windows OS
Creative Labs E-MU 0202 USB	-130 / -120 dBm	118dB	NA	Out of production	See E-MU 0204 Comments.
Creative Labs E-MU 0204 USB See note 1 Comments / Links	-132 / -122 dBm	120dB	$115	Out of production	Compatible with ASIO & MME drivers. Must set up Windows Mixer when using MME driver. See note 1.
Creative Labs E-MU 0404 USB See note 7.	-130 / -120 dBm	118dB	$150	Out of production	See E-MU 0204 Comments.
Creative Labs E-MU 1212m PCI E-MU 1212m PCIe See note 8 Comments / Links	-135dBm ASIO -130dBm MME No edge falloff	123 dB ASIO 118 dB MME	NA	Out of production	Great performance with ASIO, OK with MME.
Infrasonic Quartet PCI See note 9 Comments / Links.	-132 / -120 dBm	120 dB	NA	Out of production	Compatible for ASIO. Not compatible with MME.
Steinberg UR22 USB - See note 6	-125dBm center -135dBm@150kHz -145dBm@192kHz	115 dB	$150	In Production	Excellent drivers for W7/W8
Tascam US-366 USB Not recommended	-130 / -130 dBm	112 dB	$150 w/rebate	In production	Driver nightmare in my testing
Up to 96 kHz
Asus Xonar DSX PCIe See Note 13	-130dBm / -130dBm	119 dB	$45 w/rebate	In production	Drivers are OK with Win7
M-Audio Firewire Audiophile	-133dBm	121 dB	~$80 Used	Out of production	Not tested with Win7
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI See note 10 Comments / Links.	-133dBm	121 dB	$90	In production, but hard to find.	Excellent for ASIO and MME.
Syba (VIA) USB Sound Card SD-AUD20101 See note 3.	-125dBm	113 dB	$12	In production	Works with win 7 32 & 64-bit
Sound Blaster HD USB  See note 4.	-130dBm	118 dB	$85	In production	Works well with win 7 64b using MME drivers
Sound Blaster X-Fi  Surround 5.1 Pro USB  See note 5.	-132dBm	120 dB	$60	In production	Not tested with win 7, but they have drivers up to Windows 8.1.

Note 1: Some users have reported an issue when using E-MU 0204 with win7 64-bit and more tha 4GB RAM. Click here for details and workarounds. Specific config data for this car can be found here, E-MU 0202 / 0204

Note 2: Built into some newer motherboards. This card also has a spur at the center of the spectrum about 30dB above the noise floor. On the lower bands, this will probably disappear into the noise, but will be visible on higher bands.

Note 3: This card requires you to set a sample offset between channels. NaP3, Skimmer and HDSDR provide this feature. The setting is +1 for NaP3 and HDSDR, -1 for CW Skimmer (with IQ set to Q/I).For some reason, Skimmer uses a different convention for assigning left and right channels. Note: There is a bug in NaP3 v4.0 RC1 which requires the user to reenter the sample offset each time the program is run. This is easy to do, just a bit of an annoyance. This appears to be related to v4.0 only, so earlier versions could be used. This card also has a spur at the center of the spectrum about 20dB above the noise floor.  This is typical of sound cards built into motherboard ones. VIA provides many of the motherboard chipsets these days.The DC Block in NaP3 takes the spike down to about 5dB. On most bands, this spur will disappear into the noise. The display is flat and almost spur free, with dynamic range within 5-10dB of the best cards. Especially for laptops, you can't do any better price/performance wise than $10 for a clean 96kHz.

Note 4: This card also has a spur at the center of the spectrum about 20dB above the noise floor. On the lower bands, this will probably disappear into the noise, but will be visible on higher bands. NaP3's DC Block reduces this about 10dB.

Note 5: This card also has a spur at the center of the spectrum, but on the tested card the spur was about 15dB above the noise floor. On the lower bands, this will undoubtedly disappear into the noise, but may be visible on higher bands.

Note 6: This card is extremely well built, with a solid metal case. It has a great set of drivers and allows simultaneous use of ASIO and MME/WDM. It has a spur in the center of the display at about 35dB above the noise floor. It also has smaller spurs at plus/minus 67kHz. When properly set up, this card gradually rolls of to -10dB at + / - 80 kHz, but rolls off dramatically above that. While most cards have rising noise floor at the edges, this one has falling gain.

Note 7: This card is larger than the 0202 / 0204 and uses an external 5V power supply (supplied with international plug adapters).

Note 8: Specific config data for this card can be found here, E-MU 1212m

Note 9: Specific config data for this card can be found here, Infrasonic Quartet

Note 10: Specific config data for this card can be found here, M-Audio Audiophile 2496

Once this is done, no further adjustment is needed, because the WBIR will readjust as new strong signals appear, providing the deepest nulls for the strongest signals, and adequate rejection to hide the weaker ones in the noise. Remember, though, that when all signals are weak there will be a problem with PowerSDR/IF because it will start with faulty settings and not learn. With NaP3, it will start with the last good settings, so it will be better, and you can obtain a quick null using the WBIR section in the Config>DSP setup tab. Again, NaP3 also provides a Manual WBIR mode, which you can adjust manually with the Gain and Phase controls, or automaticall by using the "Seed" button.