[dunbar]

I once bought a Philips Harmonic Edge soundcard, model PSC602.

Plain vanilla 2 channel output. It replaced an older SB16OEM.

I initially used the Philips card under Mandrake Linux, which used a close enough match to the chipset, and all was fine: I had sounds. Poor quality sound. Horrible quality, IMO: I could hear every databit being passed in my IDE subsystem. I was playing MP3s, and I could clearly hear brrrrrt every time data was fed from the hard disk into the MP3 players' buffer (the hdd light was in synch with the brrrrt). The volume controls and mixer settings made no differences. Tried it in all slots, no changes. Reinstalled Windows, installed all the Philips software, no changes, still noisy.

I called Philips tech support:
'We are not supporting Linux' (big surprise).
They said my hardware was to fault: 'I know the card is not defective, sir, these are tested at the factory; I think your PC is failing' (yeah, an 8 month old mobo is 'failing').
I told Philips that my SB16 never made that noise.
'Did you try the card in a different slot?' Yes, all of the slots, in fact. That required 35 minutes of needless troubleshooting.
Philips person says 'Well, as I said, Linux is not supported, the card is designed for Windows'.
I told her that I had tried it under Windows; I explained that I had to reformat the hard disk and totally install Windows, just for this purpose, but still had the same noise problem.
'Well, the card can't be defective, did you try relocating the IDE cables?' Yes, still noisy.
'I'm sorry sir, I can't help you; if you insist on using Linux, you are going to be using the soundcard outside of the intended use, so you are on your own....'
I said: 'Let me repeat: I just told you the soundcard also fails under Windows, the problem is not caused by the operating system I use. I think the soundcard is either defective or very poorly designed, and I feel my money was poorly spent'.
Philips says 'The card is not defective, so this is not a warranty issue'.
I said 'I'll just toss it in the trash and will also make certain that I never reccommend Philips again'.
Philips says 'If there is nothing further....'
I say click.

I'm not whining: the person on the other end was pretty clueless about reality, and was obviously following a flowchart.
Nor am I spiteful, that was 4 months ago and cost me only $22USD. Not that I wanted to toss the card (or $22) in the trash: I still have it.


Do any other Philips card users have bad sound quality, such as I had? Or should I have set the BIOS for legacy/ISA (which I did not do and was not instructed to do)?