Avermedia PCI 550

[griz8u]

I have recently purchased an Avermedia PCI 550 card. The video quality is nice, but the audio is poor (e.g., the sound is distorted and tinny). After contacting technical support, I am convinced that the TV capture card is not great, the technical support is horrible, and the product is falsely advertised.

Poor card
I know the sound coming into the card is good- if I go directly into my Audigy 4 sound card, the quality is perfect. The poor sound does not stem from using poor audio cables- my cables are high quality, properly connected, and as mentioned above it sounds great going directly into the sound card. It is not a Sagetv issue- the quality is poor using Ultratv (native software). I have contacted tech support to get help on this issue. This leads me to the next section.


Poor tech support
The tech support is at best incompetent (see example below).

Question to tech support
My sound quality is poor on some TV channels, and I would like to customize my MPEG2 audio settings so that the bit rate is 384 Kbit/ instead of 224 Kbit/s (as was suggested in the manual). However, my software will not let me exceed 256 Kbits/s. What is the maximum audio bit rate supported by the PVR 550? What should I do to get the best possible audio from this card?

Answer from tech
The TV software customize setting what is there is what you are able to select. You can select 384 Kbit if there is no option for that.

My translation of this statement (with help from further discourse) is that the card does not support 384Kbps (see below). In addition, tech support did not even come close to answering my questions and in no way did they try to help me solve my sound problem.


Product is falsely advertised
It is clearly stated in the manual that, “For professional applications that demand best quality output, use 3000 Kbps for video and 384 Kbps for audio” (p. 33 of manual). Thus, although the manual tells you how to get a good quality recording, they FAIL to inform the buyer that the card cannot record at this setting.

Here are my questions:

1) If you are using Avermedia 500 or 550, how is your sound quality? If you do have excellent sound quality, will you please help me?
2) Has anyone contacted tech support? If so, were they helpful?

Any feedback, good or bad, is appreciated!!

[griz8u]

I just found a similar discussion at snapstream.

http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showthread.php?t=21654

Does anyone like their Avermedia 500 or 550 card? What about the 1500?

[griz8u]

see also

http://www.tv-cards.com/messageboard...25b2ec032f7b1a