ICE1712 Envy Sound Card, inbound audio

Greetings,

I have a ‘Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. ICE1712 [Envy24] PCI Multi-Channel I/O Controller (rev 02)’

The output of the soundcard to my stereo (via RCA cable) works well. However, I now need to ‘digitize’ some cassettes. I borrowed a very nice cassette deck and routed the output to a pre-amp (Yamaha RX-397), set the amp on 'tape monitor mode’and routed an RCA cable to an input port of my soundcard. So far no signal or levels are shown. When I hit record, the signal is flat. However, there are levels on the cassette deck.

I checked alsa, pavaucontrol, KMIX, I also installed Mudita24 but still no input levels. My recording software available is Ardour (4.7) and Audacity (2.1.1). I can install others if needed.

I am running Slackware 14.2, 64 bit. My GUI is KDE.

Does anyone have experience with this soundcard? What do you suppose the issue could be?

I was advised by some audio engineers that this card is quite good, but is sophisticated and just needs tinkering rather than I run out and go buy a new one.

@ccaudle

Ahh good to know, I haven’t used an ICE based card in some time so I am a bit out of date it seems.

     Seablade

Sound card is fine, have you confirmed that there is output out of the preamp? And I assume you are connected to analog inputso n the card and not digital. Finally that card is controlled via envy24control, just an FYI, if you don’t already have it I would recommend installing it.

   Seablade

@seablade,

Thanks. envy24control is part of alsa-tools, so I just installed that. Nothing so far…maybe a reboot will fix that. As for your pre-amp query, there are two ports marked “out”, I tried them both. Still no signal…

Update: Someone suggested I bypass the pre-amp and plug in the cassette player directly to my soundcard and now I get a nice, clean signal! I used Mudita24 and adjusted the Patchbay Router to get a signal. Nice sound! : - )

@fathomstory

Yep that was my point about asking if you were sure the preamp was actually outputting a signal. It sounds like it wasn’t.

    Seablade

@seablade: just for future reference, the mudita24 mentioned is an update of envy24. For some reason the changes never made it upstream to the envy24 source tree as far as I can tell.