Not sure if this is the place to ask, but the headphone jack in my laptop broke and I think is beyond repair. I was thinking about getting a USB soundcard, and there's a wide variety to buy cheap, between $1 and $10. Does anyone know if brand or price will have an impact on sound quality or do USB soundcards have no effect on it?
Yes, in the sense that you could end up buying defective garbage from Guangdong Province. Cheap is okay but be wary of getting scammed.
I tried one which looked like >>54415458 - it broke within the first month of usage. And I hardly moved the thing about!
Buy a Somake 7.1
Yes it's cheap chinese crap.
Surprisingly however it actually works, is tested exclusively and is surprisingly good.
Looks like absolute bargain bin shite, performs just as well as any expensive USB soundcard you'll buy with a more well known name on it.
http://www.gearbest.com/cables-connectors/pp_51948.html
>>54415458
They work but they are somewhat noisy, they won't work fine with most headphones unless you have a headphone amp
Also >>54415516, they lack any kind if stress relief and even a simple headphone jack will end up desoldering the USB connector or the headphone jack soon
>>54415604
So would you not recommend any soundcard whatsoever? Are there any alternatives that maintain sound quality(Just for listening to music, nothing in production)?
>>54415458
Here is a video on them. While not for your specific purpose, it does include tests on how much noise they produce. The one in the thumbnail has been reduced in quality after this video was made, so I recommend choosing a different one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuLABU6tI7Q
>>54415660
Yes, Asus and Creative products should be pretty good too, but they're slightly overpriced
Unfortunately the soundcard market is pretty much dead nowadays, it's everything about placebo audiophool crap, so everything is overpriced to hell
But even then there's some audiophool stuff that isn't bad, like the Fiio and the Topping products, both are chinkshit but good stuff and priced decently
>>54415701
This >>54415603 is better than OP, they're rebranded as 7.1 soundcards everywhere, they're less noisy than OP's and bretty good, still the durability isn't good
You could try one of them, if you aren't clumsy they might last a long time with you, they're also so cheap you might just not care about them
