Affordable/simple audio hardware for psychoacoustic experiments?

[Daniel Oberfeld <oberfeld@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear list,

in some of our undergraduate labs in Experimental Psychology, the 
students conduct simple psychoacoustic experiments like measuring a 
detection or a discrimination threshold.
To reduce the blocking of our laboratories by these courses, we want to 
purchase a simple computer setup (Matlab-based) on which the students' 
experiments can be run.

The most simple and most cost effective solution would be to connect the 
headphones (e.g. Sennheiser HDA200, which give you some sound insulation 
even outside a sound-insulated chamber) directly to the soundcard/ 
digital-to-analog converter. Does anybody here have experience with such 
a setup and could recommend a device with low noise but sufficient 
output power to drive low-impendance headphones? A stereo device would 
do, but four or more audio channels would be preferable.

Or alternatively, do you know an affordable (i.e., non-TDT) low-noise 
headphone amplifier you could recommend?

Kind regards,

Daniel


--
Dr. Daniel Oberfeld-Twistel
Johannes Gutenberg - Universitaet Mainz
Department of Psychology
Experimental Psychology

Staudingerweg 9
55128 Mainz
Germany

Phone ++49 (0) 6131 39 22423
Fax   ++49 (0) 6131 39 22480
http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/oberfeld/