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The State of PC Audio
jonesy writes "The Tech Report has put together a pretty decent six-card sound round-up that covers the most popular audio controller chips around. DACs, ADCs, DSPs, and the other important acroymns are explained. One interesting revelation: Creative's Audigy card doesn't do 24-bit/96KHz sound, despite Creative's claims. Gaming benchmarks are provided, and the authors even take a crack at the subjective side of audio, although they seem aware of the difficulties in doing so."
some people pride themselves (me not included) in a more advanced sound system so they can say they've got something better than person x's
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Is good speakers. You can't have one without the other. So what if your Sound Card is 100% buzzword compliant with 128bit 9GHz output, if your 2 cents piezo buzzer is connected to it the its a waste of space. Equally if you are playing Quake 3 and just want surround sound then there isn't much point in the card without the speakers in the right places.
For most people a basic card will, shock horror, do everything they want these days when allied to a decent set of speakers. So much of this is upgrade hype driven rather than actually reality. I've had a creative 5:1 set up for a few years now and why should I upgrade ? I listen to music mostly on the train and at work from my laptop on headphones so what would it get me. And what extra would I _really_ get for a 3D game ? Rather than marketing hype.
Get good speakers, get an okay sound card and buy lots of RAM.
If you want a top of the range sound system, buy seperates don't buy a PC.
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> some people pride themselves (me not included)
:-)
> in a more advanced sound system so they can say
> they've got something better than person x's
...and some people use their advanced sound system to do low-level synthesis, remixing, adding effects, etc. The effect of going from low-end to high-end sound hardware can be dramatic - if you're dealing with really low level synthesis, you just can't use an el-cheapo card. Case in point - I was twiddling with my music synthesis program on a friend's computer, and noticed all these weird high harmonics. After frantically searching my code for the source of the bug, I suddenly realized that the problem wasn't the program, but the soundcard. I went to a different machine, and low and behold, weird high harmonics gone. Point being, if you're creating music, especially music with subtle effects, you need to be able to hear those effects properly.
Of course, most of the people who buy fancy-schmancy sound cards are just using them for gaming. And there's nothing wrong with that, because it makes them happy and brings the prices down for me
Cheers,
DH
The problem I see with PC audio is not the quality of the cards but getting people to hook up decent speakers and listening to them. People seem to reserve their best amps and speakers for the living room and car. Already in 1991 the Sega Genesis and SNES were putting out better sound than cheap TV speakers could reproduce. DVD consoles at least may get hooked to home speakers reserved for movies, and incidentally also use it for games. MP3s have got a lot more people to listen to their PCs, but that's just a drop of the sound today's PCs and consoles can put out.
One way I see of getting people to get better sound out of their PCs and consoles is headphones. For just $20 the Koss KTX-PRO (also called the Optimus Titanium 35 Pro at Radio Shack) headphones will get you better sound than hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of amps and speakers. As for the surround effect, the Dolby Headphone algorithm supposedly simulates it with DVDs made for 5.1 speakers. It's nice that most PCs have headphone jacks; I wish consoles would as well. Many console games, and PC games as well, I would assume, have great soundtracks that never get heard.
What I'd like is solid tested drivers, and a clear separation between the actual core driver, and all the other crap they shovel into the box (all that LiveWare nonsense).
Also, I'd like them to properly test the drivers too. I've got an SBLive on an SMP machine, and I get clicks and crackles all the time. (If I disable the 2nd CPU, it's fine). A friend has the same problem.
Tim
Above/Below speakers in addition to front, back, left, right.
Then stuff like quake, rtcw, half-life, etc would be a bit more submersive. It would be nice to know if an enemy is above or below you by sound.
This can theoretically be done without extra speakers. Think about it: you only have two ears, left and right. When you hear sounds from above and below, your brain knows where they are because of the way different frequencies are filtered by the weird shape of your earlobe.
The trick is in figuring out how to filter the frequencies, and probably also in the fact that everyone's ears are a bit different so what works for some won't work for everyone. Also, it's questionable how well your brain is going to believe sound cues from above/below when your entire conscious mind is focused on a screen in front of your face. I've noticed that surround sound doesn't really work for me in a game - I want to physically turn around and look behind me rather than turning in the game to shoot the guy behind me.
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I read somewhere that a pair of high quality headphones are the best device for 3D audio. Something to do with simplifying the calculations, and the fact that each ear cannot hear what the other is, wich also helps.
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