Quote Originally Posted by SamSam View Post
I think that having a narrow list of "recommended sound cards" would be a poor idea.
I think more likely what we're talking about is a short list of sound cards that do not fit the vast and overwhelming majority of sound cards that are in use today. Matching some widely used standard, like USB is quite easy, now. When USB was brand new different products worked differently with different implmentations of the same "usb standard" at the time. Even now there's no way to guarantee that the device you are interfacing with is going to provide some specific minimum amount of current. It depends on what other devices may or may not be connected and how much current the host can source in the first place.

I don't think there's anything wrong with matching compatibility to 99% of sound cards and providing a simple USB solution for ones that require additional and/or different circuitry. Doing so would require a hardware-software interface where the software would have to detect the sound card, identify that it is a problem card, and send a special signal via audio out (or usb?) that toggles the circuit. What's worse, is if you want 100% compatibility with every sound card in existence, that probably would require more than just two circuits to match it perfectly.

Throw in age, oxidation and a bunch of other factors that no one in the entire industry is going to account for and you have plenty of cases where a sound card will just simply not do the job it's intended to do in this system. Heck, if you plug a laptop into a charger most of them will have white gaussian noise as well, distorting the original sound wave. Filtering that and coupling the noise out is not so simple to do for EVERY sound card and every machine in existence.