Suitable replacement card for Xonar PCI(e) cards

Dear alsa users,

We are looking for a replacement card for PCI(e) audio that we are using 
in our linguistics laboratory. We have been quite happy with the older 
ASUS Xonar D2 pci and ASUS Essence STX II PCIe cards. Unfortunately, 
these are out of stock in the Netherlands, I don't know whether they are 
still being made. We need quite a number of those devices in roughly 
15-25 pc's in our labs. So they were good value for money at roughly 200 
euro or dollars each. The xonars worked out of the box on recent 
versions of Ubuntu and this great to have so we do not have to make 
small adjustments to the all pc's in the lab.

Some background on psychology/linguistics research. We are looking for a 
sound card that is easy to use, and without many "expert" features. For 
quality speech recordings we are looking for devices that has a high 
signal to noise ratio (in practice we used an analog mic preamp and put 
the preamps output in the line out of the preamp in the line in of the 
xonar cards). Also we like to record as naturally as possible and we 
don't value Digital signal processors (DSPs) that mimics special preamps.
Additionally, cards using DSPs might have an internal buffer in which 
they do there processing and take additional latency. In artificial 
grammar learning or other types of experiments in which speech stimuli 
are presented to participant in our lab we greatly value the timing of 
the presentation of those speech stimuli. That is: we try to schedule a 
stimulus (speech or another sound) with 1ms accuracy. So If we know that 
ALSA or another backend uses a eg. 20ms playback/software buffer, we 
schedule the stimulus 20 ms ahead of time. We would like to keep any 
buffering delays as short as reasonably possible.

So coming back to the original question, the Xonars we were working with 
ran fine in for example Ubuntu-18.04 and even some older distributions. 
We would like to find a nice replacement that meets the requirements of 
a linguistics lab and are relatively easy to maintain. I don't know if 
this is the right place to ask, but I hope to get some input for we have 
tried quite a number of PCI(e)  devices from expensive RME equipment to 
cheaper Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus or very cheap TERRATEC Aureon 
devices. Perhaps we should move to USB class 1 and/or 2 compliant devices.

Hopefully some of you have experience with such equipment and is willing 
to give us a nice suggestion.

Best regards and thank you for your time,

Maarten



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