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."

Comments

Edirol UA-5

[Jeffrey Baker]

I think external USB audio devices are a great choice for everyday uses, gaming, and even home recording studio use. Consider a box like the Edirol UA-5. It has *real* microphone preamps, coaxial and optical digital inputs and outputs, single-ended coaxial analog inputs and ouputs, and an amplified headphone monitor output. It does not sit in your computer, so it doesn't pickup noise the way a PCI card will. It is in all ways a fairly serious piece of electronics, and you can get one for only $249.

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.

It's a gamer's review, not an audiophile one

[Zathrus]

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.