Slashdot Mirror

Lynx Studio's LynxTwo
It's a VERY high-performance card. That said, it is a professional card, and thus rather expensive. Compatible with windows, mac os, Linux, and FreeBSD. Possibly other BSDs as well.

At least according to this site, no. See " 44 KHz Digital Data To Digital Output" sections such as Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. A full list of tested cards is here Here

At least according to this site, no. See " 44 KHz Digital Data To Digital Output" sections such as Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. A full list of tested cards is here Here

I didn't know if he was joking or not, but I considered it likely enough that it was worth googling. It actually took a bit, but I believe he was referring to this, wherein it is basically revealed that there is no difference between 16 gauge cabling and, well, anything, even up into the thousands of dollars.

I have no counter examples to offer up. I see no reason why this shouldn't be true.

I believe the snarky comments should be saved for those falling for the hype, not those who do actual scientific testing and puncture it.

For soundcard and related reviews that are a lot less biased than the magazine reviews, there's this site run by a virtual aquaintance from Usenet:

http://pcavtech.com/

This site concentrates on the technical recording and reproduction quality of the cards, but it seems to me that the (audio-wise) higher quality cards also have better drivers and customer support.

I dunno specifically what "work" you use these for, but regardless of what it is, I'd recommend any "semi-pro" card (staring around $150) over any consumer card, for almost ANY "work" or business application where spending a little more money from the start can be justified. (if you're using it for non-audio purposes, I strongly recommend a real data aquisition card instead) Such cards usually don't have features you won't use or wouldn't want to use on the soundcard anyway (cheap onboard mic preamp, MIDI interface, music synthesis/soundfont playback), and any such features would generally be better off as external (good quality balanced mic into a separete balanced-input mic preamp, then into the line-input of the card) anyway.

I ended up using a "semi-pro" card for recording LP's, because every off-the-shelf soundcard I used had some sort of low-level tone or noises audible even over the crackles, pops and clicks of LP's.

Actually here are some simple double blind tests that are fun to look at.

Look at the descriptions for why some of the amps were discernible from the others. I still think the speakers are far and away the most dominant effect for how a system sounds, assuming no pathologically weak link elsewhere in the chain.

Might as well buy a decent amp of adequate power and focus on the speakers if you really want to have better sound. If you are more concerned with convincing yourself that you have better sound, spend the money on whatever floats your boat.

There is no physical possibility of having *good* onboard audio. Even with all the above construction techniques, it's damn near impossible to completely isolate the prodigious amounts of digital noise that a typical computer produces.

A much better idea is to run a digital link to an outboard DAC that has its own power supply and is outside the computer. That would actually give you extremely high quality audio, assuming the DAC box is properly designed.


As far as the "onboard" audio, I don't know. But Lynx TWO is a multi-channel professional sound card that fits in a PCI slot (and I mean real professional, not fake-spec professional) Check out the freaking specs!

What about sound cards? These should be discussed more than anything since most benchmarks are useless... They usually compare latency, which is possible the worst way to compare sound cards... and also midi features and surround features, which many people dont even use.. and 3d quality, which is required in a test, but not the main aspect

what they should compare the most is the sound quality, this i find very lacking in sound card benchmarks... such things as Signal/Noise ratio, frequency response, bass/treble controls, etc...

pcavtech does a good job of this, too bad more sites don't do something like this..

but the site did get the right point, speed is not everything, quality counts for much..

Bullshit. Vinyl can't even manage a dynamic range of 60dB at some frequencies. See here for a scientific study proving so. Vinyl is "warmer" because it is less accurate. Welcome to my foes list, Mr. Disinformator.

To do a true test, you need to encode the files, decode them to PCM wav format, then burn to an audio CD.

Then, you have to do a blind test with all of them. You also need to use a variety of source material, because different genres of music compress better under some encoders.

SNR on an amp is 100% worthless.

Way to be very authoritatively wrong. SNR is not worthless. THD is important, but so is SNR, so is RMS output, so are a lot of things. THD only describes nonlinear distortion. Here's a diagram for you to look at. It will give you a better idea what all these specs measure. And if you want to know what the THDs for those amps are, I posted links to the damn specs, look at them!

Your analogy is worthless. First off, there's no Signal on the other side of your relay...you know? As in Signal to Noise Ratio? Second, the other side of your relay has 0% THD, does that mean THD is a worthless spec?

BTW, even if you were thinking of using a relay as an amplifier, it's not going to have 1000 db SNR or 100% THD. The SNR would be around 7.78 db (for a sufficiently harmonically complex signal), and THD would be very dependent on the signal you fed it.

> slashcode strikes again stripping out proper HTML

WTF are you talking about? Just use <a href= > and </a> tags and it will show up correctly, like this. Looks like your "proper" HTML wasn't that proper to start with, duh.

Sure, you can take an end-run around the whole digital protection scheme with an analog "rip", but consider these problems: 1) the DAC -> ADC process introducing resampling artifacts (probably minor), 2) PC/EMF/motherboard/HDcontroller noise while in the analog stage (quite possible), and 3) your PC will need to be VERY close to your fancy new SACD/DVD-Audio player whenever you want to "rip" (pain in the ass, but you do NOT want a long run of analog cables to your PC). High quality soundcards with an isolated analog input section can help with #2, for a price. Here's a good site with soundcard performance benchmarks.

This seems like a step backwards: Consumers will need to upgrade PC hardware to end up with a lower quality analog rip of more expensive music media.

And not every PC is equipped with AGP

Well, every PC built in the past 3 or 4 years is... and, frankly, if your main PCs are older than that you're not likely to be reading ArsTechnica or something about a BIOS tweaking guide.

But like most 'BIOS' guides I've read, this gives alot of info on 'tweaks', with little mention of the damage that the wrong settings can do

Obviously a problem... I haven't read the article yet (didn't feel like it this morning, and it's toast now), but they should really mark the settings that are potentially dangerous. Screwing around with your RAM timings, CPU clock, etc. can release the magic smoke awfully quickly.

There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here

Not really. Creative Labs has long made the worst hardware they could get away with, and did so thanks to having created the original standard for PC sound. They've never been high quality cards, and have often caused problems with other hardware and software. Go talk to someone who tried putting an SB Live in a dual processor NT4 system about it for example.

Frankly, if you're looking for a new soundcard then there's little reason to buy Creative. For general use (games/music) both Hercules and Turtle Beach make better cards for less. For games alone, Hercules or Philips are better (Philips mentioned purely due to QSound). If you're talking about just playing music, doing a home theater PC, or mid to high end audio then a more expensive card that does real 24/96 or 24/192 audio is preferred - M-Audio and many others fit the bill here.

I do think that the incompatibility bit is somewhat overstated (I don't have any problems with my SB Live or my much older SB64 ISA), although SB's are notoriously bad about sharing PCI IRQs and the like, but the poor sound quality and total lack of compliance to industry standards are not. The digital out on the Live series doesn't comply to any spec known to man -- its voltage is roughly 10x the allowed spec. Even the Audigy continues to resample everything to 48 KHz, which plays hell with CD Audio, and their claims of 96 KHz sampling rates are deceptive at best (only applies to the digital outputs, and only sometimes at that).

If you want more details, I suggest either the PC AV Tech or [H]ardOCP's Audio forum. If you're interested in HTPC's in particular, then take a look at AVS Forum's HTPC forum.

Check out the PCAVTech benchmarks for comparing professional audio cards. Lots of solid technical info.

sorry but the review at Here at pcavtech is dead on.. tests done with audio calibration and testing hardware to give real numbers and real information not this "pull something out of our butt" review.

any review on audio equipment that doesnt use real testing is pure crap and needs to be loudly labelled as such.

forgot a link.... soundcards compared

This will give hard specs about the SB live compared to a ton of other cards... Heck the SBLive is of lower quality than the SB64PCI.

I want to see the New Audigy line spec'd out. did they finally fix all the audio problems or is it a Live warmed over.

at PC AV Tech website. A SB16 with 75 dB S/N and 74 dB dynamic range isn't acceptable to me played though a consumer stereo amplifier and decent speakers. It's probably good enough for the tinny 10-watt speakers that come with most computers these days, and I'm sure that's what Creative was targeting.

But there's some middle ground between 'fanless net-booting computers' and wanting to hear decent sound.

Here's Intervideo's WinDVD compatibility list (shows a lot of cards support 5.1 and S/PDIF). I would assume that other cards would work fine with WinDVD if they support it, but I skipped over all the ones in the list that don't have those checked.

Here's Neoseeker's audio card reviews. Links to other review sites as well. PC AV Tech seems good as well.

And the list of ones I'm still looking at:

• Midiman's Delta Series. These are professional cards, but the bottom ones might be affordable (the Audiophile 2496 in particular). Good Linux support. I'm considering going all the way and getting the Delta 66 (quite expensive...one place has it at $350) to be sure I have something that works. The audio quality would be much, much better than I need for sure. One thing I'll certainly check out more before spending all that money: I don't know if the Windows drivers support consumer game APIs like EAX and such. None of the professional cards mention this and I'm not sure if it's a "of course, even the consumer cards do that, why bother to mention it" or a "these are for recording, not games" sort of deal.
• Philips Acoustic Edge 705 and 706. These looked pretty good in a review site. I haven't checked Linux support.
• Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. One review site said they had crappy drivers as well (stability problems under 95/98), so I'm not too likely to get this one. It was an old review, though. I hadn't realized Turtle Beach was in danger of going out of business.
• Hercules Game Theater XP. This wasn't on my list before; thanks for the tip.

• AudioCatalyst vs. Producer
  
• MP3 bitrate comparison
  
• MusicMatch Jukebox vs. RealJukeBox
  
• Ars technica, worth reading.
  

• Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU)
  
• Yamaha Although I can't seem to find the popular DSP factory in a few minutes of looking on the site.
  
• Echo Audio make the Gina, Darla, and Layla cards that used to be distributed by Event Electronics
  
• Aardvark Audio
  
• Digidesign
  
• Sek'd
  
• Soundscape Digital Technologies
  
• DSP FX makes an effects processing card
  

• Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU)
  
• Yamaha Although I can't seem to find the popular DSP factory in a few minutes of looking on the site.
  
• Echo Audio make the Gina, Darla, and Layla cards that used to be distributed by Event Electronics
  
• Aardvark Audio
  
• Digidesign
  
• Sek'd
  
• Soundscape Digital Technologies
  
• DSP FX makes an effects processing card
  

• Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU)
  
• Yamaha Although I can't seem to find the popular DSP factory in a few minutes of looking on the site.
  
• Echo Audio make the Gina, Darla, and Layla cards that used to be distributed by Event Electronics
  
• Aardvark Audio
  
• Digidesign
  
• Sek'd
  
• Soundscape Digital Technologies
  
• DSP FX makes an effects processing card
  

There are no consumer sound cards on the market that even come close to the output quality of a halfway decent component CD player. One of the main reasons for this is tons of electromagnetic noise inside the case, but also just because sound card manufacturers like to make money. I can pretty much guarantee if you've got a halfway decent stereo hooked up to your computer the weak link is the sound card.

That said, the best way to try to improve sound quality is make sure you've got one of the better cards on the market. Some good tests can be found here.

Also, for some Linux specific issues, the Audio-Quality-HOWTO is a good source.