Cm6206lx Driver

[Lauro Pericles]

If you wish to start a YouTube or Twitch career, transfer your old audio cassette recordings or vinyl collection to your computer, C-MEDIA CM6206 External USB Sound Card is a very nice solution in case you use a modern laptop without integrated multi-channel audio card and dedicated Line-In or MIC inputs. This card can be bought really cheap on Amazon, AliExpress, BangGood and similar online stores, and have it delivered for free in few days or weeks.

However, engineers who designed and manufactured this sound board crippled LINE-IN analog recording inputs frequency response in low / bass section by putting very small coupling capacitors! Why oh why ???

CM6206 hardware is perfectly capable going all the way down to a sub-hertz (less than 1 Hz) flat frequency response if desired / required. You can even bypass input AC coupling capacitors to enable DC input, with some precaution (useful for audio oscilloscope applications and DC signal measurements e.g. using Daqarta software).

C-MEDIA CM6206 audio codec is used in many different sound cards, including 7.1 surround models. It supports separate Headphone output, mute, rec mute, digital volume controls, dual mono MICROPHONE inputs and more! Of course, in this 5.1 model not all the features are used (obvious cost reduction saving on external parts and components), but what can you expect from a $5 or $10 sound card? More expensive $20 models come with 7.1 audio, dedicated headphones output, dual MIC and LINE-IN inputs, Volume and Mute controls, but those are not really essential, as you can achieve the same in software, although they can be convenient as dedicated hardware buttons.

In this video I have upgraded input coupling capacitors with larger values and improved frequency response considerably! In the end of the video is a line-in recording example using C-MEDIA CM6206 5.1 External USB Sound card with and without this modification compared to the original audio, along with the frequency response charts.

You should avoid recording at high levels near 0 dB (+/- 1.40 Volts) anyway, to avoid clipping. Remember, DC offset in audio is bad because it effectively reduces available dynamic range and maximum signal input voltage span.

I want to use it to measure some speakers, and TS parameters, with Art / Limp, Rew. I use a Dayton imm-6 microphone for measurement. I also have others calibrated, but I wanted to compare after replacing the capacitors with a Presonus card of 100 Euro + microphone Sonarworks ref 20, calibrated.

Hi! Thanks for your upgrade recommendation. They are helpful. My question is whether film capacitors like WIMA MKP (polypropylene) would be a better alternative to electrolytic caps? They are not prone to aging and are actually more often used in high-grade audio applications.Thanks!

For the low signal coupling inputs, again, yes, in theory, those MKPs (or cheaper MKTs) would be great, but they do not affect the signal much beyond the inherent high-pass filtering (RC resonant circuit), and because the signal is low power kind, losses in capacitors are your least concern.

You cannot improve AD and DA converters merely by upgrading input or output coupling capacitors! The signal will still be the same, limited by converter precision, quantization noise, jitter etc. Bottom line, buy another more powerful DSP audio card, instead of capacitors in that case. You will just waste your money on the wrong items otherwise.

I would suggest to try drivers that come with this card on a mini disc (mini CD), that should at least give you native control over SPDIF and gain, something which seems not possible with generic USB Audio drivers (assuming you use Windows, but it could be the same issue on Linux and Mac).

Try replacing both ceramic and polymer capacitors at line input with film. There are relatively small and inexpensive 63v models available. It can significantly reduce input dc offset due to much lower leakage current of such caps.

Another thing is that DC offset is probably caused by poorly balanced (uncompensated) input stage inside C-MEDIA chip itself, and I seriously doubt that external capacitor alone can eliminate it or make a noticeable improvement, but I could be wrong.

On the version of the PCB that I have, C14 is not populated. I can see from your photos it is present, but from the angle the photos are taken I cannot read the value from them. Could you tell me what is fitted to C14 on your PCB?

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You can find the driver for the CM6206/CM6206-LX chipset on the C-Media website or on other websites that offer device drivers. The driver is compatible with Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. rooftop snipers is also a great website for you.

If fixing USB DM with a pull-down resistor fixes the recognition problem, your system may have a signal integrity problem or an unconventional USB configuration foodle. Check your PCB layout, USB connector, and wiring again to make sure there are no potential problems or variations from the USB requirements.

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Thanks for helping, though it's really not about the connection to my NAS, and it's not only Kodi. I suspect it's an ALSA driver issue. The CM6206-LX has been around for a long time, some variants seem to have been around for at least 14 years (and the Windows drivers provided by the OEM go back to 2009 for XP&Vista), but different vendor variants maybe behave slightly differently.

That's a very interesting link. I don't think it's applicable in my current situation, but I would have loved to know of this kind of audio duplication and remapping of channels to SPDIF output for another project a few years ago.

I can't say what is different now, I surely didn't intentionally change anything with the setup in LibreELEC or Ubuntu, I even use the exact same USB port for the DAC. However, after a few system restarts and moving the USB DAC to my Windows PC and back a couple of times more, the device is now providing sound also on the Center & LFE output. Works with both LibreELEC (both Kodi and speaker-test) and in Ubuntu Desktop (GUI and speaker-test).

I changed nothing about the configuration of the two Linux setups, and there's no difference in the hardware logs related to the USB DAC from what I can tell. I have no real explanation for why it was not working previously in Linux, and why it works now. Best guess I can come up with is that perhaps there is something persistent written to the device from running it in Windows, perhaps related to changing the speaker setup there, for that is as far as I recall the only thing I have manually done. I don't even have the OEM drivers installed, just using the included generic driver that comes with Windows 10.

Also to note for good measure I ran a quick test with media on a USB stick (USB 3.0 NVME adapter with an M.2 PCIe SSD), and the auto-adjusted out-of-sync latency due to self-learning was still in the 42-45 ms range. Perhaps it's more related to my current system than network or storage source. "pastekodi" wouldn't give me a link, I suspect the debug data was too large to be uploaded.

I'm no expert on out-of-sync in Kodi, though the way I read things, up to 100 ms is allowed for this value, and there is no error triggered related to it (no error adjustments). I also have not changed the default (10 ms), so why it once printed 35 ms for this initial value is very weird; all other times it is 10 ms as expected. And it still performed the self-learning adjustment after, which is only done when the initial setting is 10 ms.

First reproduction was during a video playback, approximately 10-15 minutes after starting playback. I got slightly annoyed with a minor lip sync mismatch, and went to alter the audio offset by a small amount. After I altered the Audio Offset slightly, first down then up, after a moment I noticed the center channel disappearing. Might have been a gradual loss over a few seconds. But, it was gone, just like before.

Next, I disconnected the USB DAC, hooked it up to a Windows PC briefly just to perform a sound test on the center channel (successful, no problem), and then I moved it back to LibreELEC. After this, the center & LFE again are operational.

Odd, I thought, so after a minute or two of working center channel, I again tried to modify the audio offset. And again, the problem was triggered. This time I removed the USB DAC, connected to my Windows PC only briefly, and then moved it back. The result, center & LFE once more operational.

Now, unfortunately after enabling debug tracing, I was not able to trigger the problem a third time by altering the audio offset. I've tried to restart LibreELEC, and still not been able to trigger it again. I have disabled debugging, restarted Kodi and LibreELEC, even disconnected and reconnected the USB DAC during playback. I am still unable to reproduce it a third time today.

I still very much doubt there is any problem with network or storage in my setup. I have wired gigabit connectivity and a fast low-latency storage server. I play high quality video perfectly with no issue, including the Jurassic Park trailer at 32 Mbps video and close to 7 Mbps PCM 5.1 audio. Immediate playback, no stutters, no hiccups. No errors in the logs. But of course I can't rule out something under the hood and hidden during playback would cause some corner case to trigger a problem with the USB DAC. It's unfortunate that I don't have debug logs from Kodi from the times I managed to reproduce the problem, but I will activate debugging and keep trying.

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