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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."
The only drawback in my mind is you cannot use the USB interface for 24/96 audio. That, and some issues like jitter and delay, should be solved by the next generation of IEEE-1394 interfaces.
I'll repost (most of) the comment I put on TR this morning. TR's comments don't get much feedback usually, and I'd like to get responses/pointers on the points I bring up.
The review is completely oriented toward gaming though, with only a slight nod toward music listening or DVDs (and the cards reviewed aren't particularly good toward those). With that in mind, the review isn't all that bad. And it brings up several nasty issues with Creative Labs - their drivers continue to suck, they seriously overdo reverb in EAX (uh, guys... you wrote the standard... why can't you do it right?), bloatware on a massive scale, and some of the comments indicate possible spyware.
Anyway, my original comment is now below, sans a few bits that pertained only to over there.
Sigh... well, not what I was hoping for, but still a decent review (as soundcard comparisons go at least). Should've marked this as a review for gamers though - for those looking to build a Home Theater PC it's reviewing the wrong cards (the M-Audio 6-channel is pretty much the standard nowadays, but there are competitors).
It would've been nice to get a few motherboard chipset reviews in with the cards. I know, you were already in review hell. But to whomever is going to try this next, do include a review of the cheapo AC97 codecs, the upgraded ones (such as CT5880), nForce, and such.
There are also sampling/playback issues - CL has long had an issue with automagically resampling from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. This introduces errors during playback. Testing to see which cards do this (on either record or playback) would've been nice.
Testing to see if the connectors provided are actually standard conforming would've been nice too. The digital output jack on the SB Live series, for instance, conforms to no standard known to man. It will work with most Dolby Digital decoders, but not all of them - it runs the voltage far, far, FAR too high, has absolutely no noise protection, and a few other issues. CL deciding to label their IEEE1394 connector as a "SB1394" makes me suspicious of it as well.
I still have a Sound Blaster 16. That card is about 7 years old (Give or take a year) It was origianally on my 486 50mhz and then I just moved it to each adional PC that had the 16 bit ISA Port. It still works greate it plays the MP3 and Wav files fine. Sure MIDI sounds a bit comicical compared to the new cards but But with software rendering it still plays nicly. I am not a big gamer but I do have a good ear. And the sound I am getting out of that Sound Blaster 16 is as good as it would come out of those little speakers.
Odly enought unlike vidio cards sound cards dont have the same obsolete rate as other gaming intended cards. They still work with modern games.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why death to software mixers? Unless you are really CPU-bound, they should sound the same. It's not like there's anything special about code that's burned into a ROM as opposed to code that's resident in RAM. The only reason that 3D apps need hardware OpenGL routines is because the main CPU has better things to do -- it speeds the game up. As far as I'm aware, software mixing is nowhere near as CPu-intensive. It it were, there wouldn't have been MOD, S3M, MTM, etc. (multi-channel audio from back in the day) files that were easily handled by my old 386SX-16 with 1MB RAM.
If it sounds like crap, it's because the software's crap not any inherent property of software-driven mixing.
And yes, Windows can do software mixing, but apps don't have to support it; they just tell Windows to play the sound. The important part is that sound card drivers must be DirectSound compatible.
As for sounding like dirt, I'll leave that to your own ears. Personally, I find that it's the quality (or lack thereof) of my speakers that makes a far greater audio difference than the crappy software mixing. But then again, I'm not an audiophile.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
What features are still in demand from them, considering they can play damn near any sound that we can possibly hear already, and do it directionally?
24-bit video cards can also display anything you can see, but that doesn't mean that there aren't new features to be added.
In the long run, it wouldn't surprise me to see sound cards becoming the primary processor for lots of audio-related functions. There's already spatial-audio calculations (EAX/A3D), much like 3d-accelleration in video. Some sound cards also accellerate mp3 decoding. I wouldn't be surprised if this became more common, and perhaps extended to other audio formats. After that... how about a sound card which has on-chip speech recognition, or at least support for some related processes (speech-recognition acceleration)?
not.
If you have $9800.00 each legacy audio studio monitors they will sound like crap if you have a crappy amp and crappy source. speakers are the 3rd most important. AMP with very low THD and clean transients is the number one most important component of an audio system. anyone who says otherwise is faking it. Second your audio source has to be clean and handle the dynamic range. and finally the speakers.
a pair of 100 watt speakers on a 5000 watt amp will sound better and last longer than a pair of 500watt speakers on a 10 watt amp.
in fact I can blow any set of speakers on this planet with a 10 watt amp. (DC clipping is NOT your friend)
So if you want really good audio out of your computer, have your soundcard drive a nice amp and then some decent speakers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't trust USB completely. I've had problems with hubs deciding not to supply power, and the bandwidth is too narrow. From what I've heard about USB CD recorders, I'm not alone. For $450, you can get Digidesign's Mbox, which is firewire-based. It samples at up to 24-bit/48khz, has focusrite mic pre-amps with phantom power, and most importantly, zero latency. It also comes with Pro Tools audio recording/editing software. No, I don't work for them, I've just been drooling over this thing lately. The idea of having a decent home studio with one of these and a laptop...
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