USB sound card

[Doug Sutherland]

John,

I have a USB headset that does not require drivers on windows or linux.
It requires not installation at all, it uses the standard USB audio drivers
and just works. Plugging it in creates a composite USB device, both the
playback device (stereo headpone) and recording device (microphone)
appear as Labtec USB Audio device. It is Labtec model LVA-8712.
They are probably not made anymore and may be impossible to find
this exact model, but I'm sure there are many others like it. Look for
headsets or external USB audio adapters that require no drivers, so
you can use them on any computer.

As an aside I have found some audio chips that do exactly this, they
are driverless, some are codecs and some are dacs, some have line
out only, some have line in and out, some have S/PDIF output only,
some have S/PDIF in and out, some have USB to I2S output. They
are all Texas Instruments parts. I will be working with these soon,
will share a bit more about this later. I will soon have speech synth
appearing as USB audio device driverless, among other things.

  -- Doug