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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."
I use a sound blaster 16 on machine. It cost 12. Its grand , plays mp3's ... and games...
Am I the only one who doesn't have an orchestra in the back of my pc , or are most people on this type of older card ?
Cruise TT
My computer goes "BEEP" when I hit Ctrl-g. What else do I need?
omg, evreyuone knows teh REAL BEST sound cards r the ones that overcl0kc teh BERST.
like, i oc'd my mediavision proaduiuospectrum16 (don't laff its teh BEST) and now i can hear sounds b 4 they happen!
like, omg. this guy was gonan shoot me with rocket launcher but i heard it before hje shooted then i was gonna shoot him first but tehn i heared my shotgun fire b 4 i even press the button!!1!!
HE WAS DEADRESTATED B 4 I EVEN SHOOTED HIM!
I R TEH S0 GLAD I READED THIS REVIEWS.
MY SHOTGUN SOUNDS SO CLEAN AND CRISP AND CLEAR AND BECAUSE I R TEH AUDIOPHILz0RZ I KNOW IT SOUNDS AS BEST AS REALISTIC YES IS.
seriously, sound card reviews like this are a crock, providing little information above the specifications provided by the manufacturers themselves. as evidenced by the previous story about the s00per c00l vacuum t00b sound card, people can't be fooled into thinking these things will provide "audiophilez0rz" quality.
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
Lower distortion (all types). Lower noise. Better anti-aliasing filters. More linear DACs/ADCs. Balanced I/O. Improved RF rejection.
Card volume implemented with motor control pot instead of FETs or digital scaling. Eliminate the
digital EQ that causes phase distortion even when nulled.
Is that enough?
Need better sound out of a laptop? Lots of them do have cheap soundcards. Try USB audio "boxes". Here are a couple from amazon:
Yamaha AP-U70 CAVIT External Audio.... $350 or so. Include a built in amplifier.
or
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Extigy Sound..., for about $134.
I don't know about Linux support, but they will makes a Windows Laptop rock.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
Yeah. If you are going to do anything music-related, invest in *studio monitors* .. the Yorkville YM-1s are what I have. A very unbiased sound, set me back about 250$ american, and easily the most important part of my setup after the signal is mixed down and goes out my audio card (Echo MIA).
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Most Audigy users that have looked at any of the sound card forums out there have already discovered their claims are false.
Creative seems to have really dropped the ball with the Audigy line. A look at any audio forums (Creative's own even) will show a large contingent of unhappy customers. Audiophiles that think it's a piece of crap sound-wise, gamers who are pissed off with its driver performance. Calls for people to return their Audigies and get a Game Theatre or Santa Cruz.
Compatibility issues with different hardware configurations, WinXP, etc.. are also popping up. The biggest seems to be an issue where the EEPROM on the card gets scrambled, disabling the rear speakers, and causing the card to be recognized as EMU10K instead of an Audigy, thereby making proper software/driver upgrades impossible for it. The only known solution for this so far is to get the card replaced and hope the new one doesn't get FUBAR as well. There are a lot of very annoyed Audigy owners out there.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
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.
You want quality audio in a PC? Go get a card made by these people, these people, these people, these people, these people, or these people. Then we'll talk.
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.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I would only recommend this to musicians or engineers though, since it's a bit of overkill for RTCW.
Recording? Wow! It is absolutely quiet.
Get Pro Tools free from Digidesign. Musicians like Beck, Bjork and Aerosmith use it. Of course, they use the version that's tens of thousands of dollars. Basically, the difference is the more money you spend, the more hardware (and thereby processing power) you get.
The best way to learn is to just start doing it. If you have a sound card and Pro Tools free, you should be able to just start laying down tracks with the mic that came with your computer. Experiment with EQ settings. It's all about training your ear to recognise what sounds good and what doesn't. After you've recorded an album's worth of material, you'll find you're able to make much better sounding songs, though you won't be sure how you got there.
If you don't have a sound card, get one that has at least a stereo input and output. Before you get it, make sure it's supported by whatever software program you're using. If you don't have a firewire port, think about getting one. Firewire is useful in so many ways.
If you want to get some higher fidelity, you'll need to get a decent mic. Pick up a Shure SM57 if you're recording mostly instruments or 58 if it's mostly vocals ($80-100). These mics are workhorses of the industry and will remain useful even after you become a famous rock star. You might be able to find a XLR -> 1/8" adapter to plug the mic into the back of the computer, but I recommend either buying a cheap mixer and going mic -> mixer -> soundcard, or getting Digidesign's mBox ($450), a firewire-based audio input system. The good thing about the mBox is you get a more robust version of the software along with it.
Pro Tools isn't the only way to go, though I think it's the only way that's free. Kruder & Dorfmeister use Cubase, and Thievery Corporation use Cakewalk. I've heard lots of great things about Cubase, but the Cakewalk seems to be more amateurish. Thievery has a crapload of hardware, and I think Cakewalk is just a small part of their studio.
If you're broke, you can always pirate plug-in's from p2p networks, but audio programmers are generally non-rich really cool people, so if you ever wind up making decent money off of your music, you should buy the software you use frequently.
If you're into programming, check out MAX/MSP. Autechre uses it.
Also, check out Propellerheads Software:
Reason- Berklee is using this to teach recording concepts.
Rebirth- 303, 808, 909. Kicks ass.
For a reference, my stuff was recorded using Pro Tools with the Audiomedia III sound card (it's pretty old), a Neumann TLM103 mic and a Roland xp-60 synth, both going into a mackie 1202 mixer. I'm completely self-taught.
c-hack.com |
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...
c-hack.com |
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.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
If anybody is considering buying an Audigy because of the remote, think again. I don't think the article made any mention of the remote (which I believe is only available in the Platinum or better) , but it is just about worthless if used in conjunction with anything else that uses a remote.
I had set up a small tower in my living room, complete with wireless keyboard/mouse and an ATI All-in-wonder, and I upgraded from the SB Live to the Audigy for several reasons- better inputs/outputs mounted on the front were important, but the remote control was extremely important. After all, if I could use this remote to control winamp and other programs (possibly including the ATI TV app), I wouldn't need the keyboard or mouse 90% of the time.
Unfortunately, every other remote I have interfered with the audigy - I couldn't use the DVD player, TV, stereo, or even the PS2 remote without royally pissing off the Audigy Remote app (even when pointing the remotes in the opposite direction, it still picked up signals far more often than the devices that were supposed to get the signal). Ironically, the Audigy remote caused the least amount of response from the Audigy, and no problems with the rest of the entertainment center. And the Audigy Remote app is such a horribly bloated app that I had to disable it entirely (which is almost as difficult to do as disabling RealPlayer or removing all the AOL icons).
I like the sound that comes out of the card, I like the 1/4" input jacks (which lets you plug a guitar directly in the front, for example), and I like the fact that there are so many controls and inputs that are mounted on the front (with the platinum version). But the remote was such a disappointment; don't buy this card for that feature - you may get better results, but don't raise your hopes.
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