Unboxing #16: StarTech.com 7.1 USB Sound Card and ASUS XONAR SE 5.1 PCIe Sound Card | In The Lab

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In this video I unbox two surround-sound sound-cards which I ordered recently from Amazon:

These were replacements for this sound card which I couldn’t get working in surround sound (only stereo): USB 5.1 Audio Sound Card 6 Channel Sound Card Built in HighEnd Chip, with Sound Mixing Function Support 48/44 KHz Sampling Rate for Both Playback and Recording.

You can get the latest software for the StarTech USB sound card over here: https://www.startech.com/ICUSBAUDIO7D

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Yum Cha Metal SpudgersThis is an image of the product.

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BIOS settings for ‘verve’

I went hunting in the BIOS for ‘verve‘ which has a ASUS PRIME B550M-A motherboard and I found I needed to change two settings.

The first setting was Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> SVM Mode = Enabled. This enables AMD-V and allows the CPU to function in a hypervisor.

The second setting was Advanced -> Onboard Devices Configuration -> USB power delivery in Soft Off state (SS) = Disabled. This fixes the problem with the power button not working as discussed here: Earth leakage hack.

Extra Content #2: Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR

This post is part of my video blog: In The Lab With Jay Jay.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

This is a long and unedited video of me upgrading my computer from ‘longing’ https://www.jj5.net/sixsigma/Longing to ‘lore’ https://www.jj5.net/sixsigma/Lore

As I said today was computer upgrade day. I made a video of me doing the upgrade, it runs for about two hours: Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR. It was pretty uneventful and so far it seems to have been successful too. Yay.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

aToolTour Black Hexagon Deburring Drill BitThis is an image of the product.notes

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New motherboard: ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR

Ordered myself a new motherboard today, the ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR. This new board will replace my ASUS PRIME B550M-A in my new/upgraded computer ‘lore‘ (which is replacing ‘longing‘).

This new board has 2x M.2 PCIe 4.0 (as with the old motherboard), 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet (compared to 1x 1Gbps Ethernet in my old motherboard), and 3x PCIe 16x slots (compared to 1x PCIe 16x slot in my old motherboard).

I will put in 2x M.2 PCIe 4x adapters and 2x M.2 PCIe 1x adapters which will mean I am able to install 6x M.2 drives: 2x Kioxia 256GB, 2x Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, and 2x PNY 1TB.

I will also put in a quad 2.5Gbps PCIe Ethernet adapter which will give me six 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports in total (two onboard and four on PCIe 16x).

When I’m done all four RAM slots will be full (4x Corsair Vengeance 32GB 3200MHz DDR4), both the M.2 slots will be full, all three of the PCIe 16x slots will be full, all four SATA ports will be full (3x Western Digital WD Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB and 1x ASUS BW-16D1HT PRO 16X Blu-ray burner), and both PCIe 1x slots will be full too. Also there will be a bunch of high speed USB ports available on both the front and the back of the case. I feel like I have really squeezed a lot of juice out of this system, it’s operating very close to capacity.

I’m kinda dreading plugging in the USB attachments to the front panel, but I guess if I RTFM and apply some thought I will be able to figure that out.

Stuttering audio on Ubuntu on Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Motherboard

My new computer ‘charm‘ wasn’t playing audio, there was just some incomprehensible and quiet static coming out of the speakers (I was testing with this). I ran this search and found this and ran this:

# apt install libavcodec-dev

Then I edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and added:

# 2022-03-24 jj5 - SEE: https://askubuntu.com/a/1059492
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

And I edited /etc/pulse/default.pa and changed:

# 2022-03-24 jj5 - NEW:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=1
# 2022-03-24 jj5 - OLD:
#load-module module-udev-detect

And I edited /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and added this at the end:

; 2022-03-24 jj5 - SEE: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766860&p=4816308#post4816308
default-sample-rate = 48000
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 10

I also read this and ran this:

# apt install inxi
# inxi -SMA
# apt-get install --reinstall alsa-base pulseaudio
$ mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.bak

Then after a reboot or two (and enabling USB Audio in BIOS) it started working! Probably didn’t need most of that, but I’m happy to have a solution.