[RTTY] USB Dongle Sound Cards

[Joe Subich, W4TV]

> I've been through countless control panels and sound card control
> apps, trying both line in and mic, looking for the secret sauce to
> get MMTTY to see separate channels, and I've only gotten a couple of
> them to actually behave that way.

Jeff, there is no "secret sauce" ... you need to look at the specs of
the "dongle" if the manufacturer/vendor supplies them.  Some are built
using a single chip USB CODEC designed for headset operation - those
have a mono (mic) input and will often identify the input as "headset
mic" in Windows 7.  Others are built using a stereo input version of
the USB chip and will typically not include the preamp (stereo line
inputs).

The quickest way to tell if a given dongle will support stereo receive
is to see if the "Default Format" (Windows 7 Sound Control Panel -
Recording Devices / Advanced tab) can be set for two channels.  If the
particular dongle displays only single channel options, you have a
headset adapter.

73,

    ... Joe, W4TV


On 12/11/2012 6:14 PM, Jeff Stai wrote:
> I've played with several USB sound cards of all shapes, sizes, and prices.
>
> They all play well with MMTTY and by extension Writelog, if you are just
> using a single audio stream ("mono").
>
> However, I have had relatively poor luck with specific sound cards when I
> want to utilize the separate left and right channels to decode independent
> receivers - even though the sound card is billed as a stereo card having
> stereo inputs.
>
> It seems as if there is a subset of cards which MMTTY is able to recognize
> and utilize the Left and Right as independent channels, while the rest of
> them it doesn't - they act like mono cards.
>
> I've been through countless control panels and sound card control apps,
> trying both line in and mic, looking for the secret sauce to get MMTTY to
> see separate channels, and I've only gotten a couple of them to actually
> behave that way.
>
> - jeff wk6i
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Dave Greig <daven3buo at att.net> wrote:
>
>> We were just talking in this group about low price USB Sound cards. I did
>> some looking on Ebay and Amazon and they can be found as cheap as $15.00.
>>   Does anyone know what the quality is like?
>>
>
>
>