Zefiro ZA-2: Aaron Crane reports the following info about the ZA2: It has stereo analog output, coax (RCA) and fiber-optic (Toslink) S/PDIF in and out, and XLR AES/EBU in and out. It costs $419 at the moment. The OSS/Linux driver can only record and play back at certain speeds, which I would guess makes it essentially useless for many people. The OSS/Linux driver is also pretty much broken. If you're careful, you can do some work with it, but I had four or five hard lockups in perhaps 20 hours of actual usage. 4Front Technologies are not AFAICT intending to fix these problems; they say that the card is too different from everything else they do...
In summary, even though it looks like a fairly impressive card, I (Aaron) can't really recommend anyone thinking about getting into digital audio for Linux to choose the ZA2.
...there now exists a free driver for linux which works (at least for me) fine. It can be downloaded from http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzsa69/za2.html...
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