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Motherboard Audio Comes Of Age
darth_silliarse writes "ExtremeTech have thankfully confirmed that I am not completely deaf - onboard m/b sound is not as bad as it sounds. Is onboard sound for the poor, needy or completely bone idle? What are other peoples opinions of m/b sound? If nothing else, it frees up a PCI or ISA slot... ;o)"
THG did a nice rundown a while ago on (still-)existing audio chipsets on Mobos and sound cards, comparing bells&whistles, CPU usage and IIRC quality.
Cheers.
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And much better than speakers is a decent set of headphones. Cans will beat speakers costing several times as much. Get a pair of cheaper Sennheisers (HD487's) or Grado's (SR 60's) which come in well under the $100 mark but will just blow you away with their awsome sound quality if you are used to anything but an audiophile setup. From there you might get into some of the more expensive models but these are great for me and I'm used to studio monitors.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
probably need an adapter in the near future.
There were some articles on Tom's Hardware a while back (can't find them now) which gave anything up to an 18% performance hit (frame rate wise) for onboard sound with EAX enabled.
Turning on EAX with my audigy or SB live platinum makes 1-2% difference.
Presumably the onboard sound chips are using the CPU for a lot more of the grunt work - not a great thing for a gamer, or indeed for a Linux user* unless they are _sure_ that there will be (good) drivers for that chip.
*Yes, yes, you can be a gamer _and_ a Linux user you know.
Beep beep.
In most situations I don't think it actually matters. A computer produces so much EMI which in turn creates noise in the audio regardless of whether you are running on-board sound or otherwise. Unless you are getting the signal out of the computer digitally, there is going to be noise. The only real reason I can think of for buying a high-end peripheral sound-card is if you need it for use as part of a digital audio workstation (high smaple-rates, resolution etc... or because you want multi-channel surround. -- Book
-- Book
Not necessarily. If the signal path from the Mac into the stereo amp is electrically noisier than the signal path from the stereo's CD player to the amp, it could easily sound worse from the Mac. The source signal would be very much the same, but it's getting fux0red along the way.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I was wondering when/if someone was going to mention Nforce 2.
Here is a page with good info about the sound on an Nforce 2 motherboard. http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/nforce2/nforce_2 .htm
All of that looks impressive for ON BOARD sound, and I really think that 99.9% of the people out there would find that this is good enough.
No reason to lie.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
The program allows you to emulate sound for older dos games that you would like to play under Win2k or XP. I use it for playing some old Space Quest games. The driver works so I have no need to go get a newer version of the game. (I am using the origional .exe)
I appoligize for not putting in a proper link, but it is 9:05 AM on sunday morning, my hands don't want to work that hard, off to get some coffee.
I am a pretty serious audiophile. I have a high quality surround sound system in a home theater and decent quality pc speakers. I often connect my PC to my sound system for parties and the like. I use my pc as a jukebox and I listen to music 24/7.
I have always used Creative sound products because back in the day they were consistantly better than everything else available. I still use a Soundblaster Live 5.1 in my PC, but my latest motherboard (ASUS P4PE) came a pretty serious audio system on board. I have compared the two and found that when using the optical/coax digital out from the motherboard sound I get consistantly better quality than out of my Soundblaster on my surround system. This isn't just the reduction in noise, but an overall better processing of the sound before it hits my system.
That doesn't mean I prefer the onboard sound. For games the Live performs considerably better than the onboard system.
I think that unless you are a serious audio professional and are willing to fork out the big dollars for a ultra high quality soundcard you wont really notice the difference.
FOr me on board sound is not going to work. I have a 1000+ CD collection and have ripped many cd and songs to MP3. All my ripps are digitial extrationsand encoding. Compare a analog ripped song to one that has be ripped digitally you will notice the sound difference. FOr those rare ocasions that is becoming more common with each cd released. The software can't do a digital rip/ or the cd won't play in the computer. I play the CD in one of my home stereo CD players (most are over 6 years old and use the digitial SPDIF (TOSlink) outputs and use my digital I/O duaghter board connected to my soundcard to capure the digital stream. I haven't met a CD yet that i could not make into a digitally ripped MP3.
Also with the digital outputs on my daughterboard I can playback use the fiberoptic cable to play back the music on my home stereo system. So if you doa lot of recording an always have music playing from your computer a seperate soundcard is the only answer. until optical inputs/outputs become standard on motherborads
Just my 2 cents
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Please see Geeks In Space #27 for a discussion of MP3.
Quote:
MP3's rock because you can put hundreds of CD's on a 20 gig drive.
MP3's suck because then it sounds like shit.
Ever notice how the cymbal crashes sound like utter and complete ass? It's the same thing as the JPEG artifacts in pictures, but instead of visual artifacts they're aural artifacts. MP3 sucks unless it's encoded at 192 kbps or above for that reason.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
If you think the difference between being an audiophile and hearing the difference between CD and 128 bit, you are sooo wrong.
:-)
128 bits STILL fucks with the bass quite a bit as well as the siblances. Do a lot of cymbal work and see how fast articulately played sounds kinda merge together. Do anything that requires bass to be seperate and expressive, and that too won't work. Standard pop? Yeah, I'll do ya one better and state 64kbs is over stated for that
I'm sitting here with 8 year old JBL studio monitors and I can most definately hear the difference between CD and 128. Most of the time I just don't care. I can't hear the difference between 44 and 96 except that playing 44 over 96 sounds better. The physical make up of the sound card means that you can use more consumer level parts to have the aliasing happen PAST the human range of hearing -- which is around 22khz, meaning that something well engineered and recorded on a 44khz using the best specs will sound just as good...
if you said recorded in 96 / 24bit...I would agreed. Since you said 128...you obviously haven't listened to MP3s over decent equipment.
All my CDs are burned to my Mac and in MP3 (or now AAC) format and they sound good enough to listen to. When it comes time for reference materials, we go for the physical package.
I would agree, DJs often spend a lot of time in clubs with loud PA. Unless you wear ear plugs you can damage your hearing (your top end tends to go)
If you're looking to get sound, then MB sound is just fine. I use it for filler/background noise all the time and love it.
If you're looking for music, they still have miles and miles to go before they will compete. Check out products by Lynx,M-Audio,,RME and Digital Audio Labs
Also check out this thread in a forum for a list of just some of the cards that are worth looking at.
HiFi Sound Cards
And don't be fooled by statistics and numbers, even the best DAC in the world can get messed up by some 2bit clown laying it down with the wrong analog circuitry to support it.
I'm not saying that the people who lay out all these cards are 2bit clowns, just that people look at the numbers and don't use their ears all too often.
The most important thing is do you like the sound that comes out of the system. If yes, then who cares what else is out there. Be happy with it.
The other good thing about MP3 is its versatility. Your examples are fitted perfectly for their bitrates, but I prefer a better-quality MP3 as I do listen to MP3's on my home stereo and other places where a high-quality bitrate is A Good Thing. I would rather sacrifice space for quality on my iPod, but you sacrifice quality for space. This is a personal preference. I prefer high-quality.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
The problem is that 33MHz 32-bit PCI slots (which are still the only available PCI variant on practically every mainstream motherbord currently available) have a limited bandwidth (133 Megabytes per second in total, if I'm not mistaken). Every PCI card takes up some of this bandwidth. Since bandwidth demand in most interfaces and other devices just keeps on increasing, this is becoming more and more of a problem, and it will remain a problem as long as PCI Express is not yet a common standard.
PCI bandwidth scarcity already led to the introduction of the separate AGP port, which already relieves the PCI bus from the most bandwidth hungry category of interface cards, namely graphics cards. A motherboard can have only one AGP port however (that's why AGP is a port, while PCI is a bus). Also, the use of AGP is limited to graphics cards only.
Another way to save PCI bandwidth is to integrate certain functinality otherwise implented through separate PCI cards directly in a chipset's southbridge (either that or by connecting interface chips to the southbridge through another faster internal interface, such as Hypertransport or VIA V-Link). We're talking about IDE controllers (plain old ATA as well as Serial ATA), USB 2.0, Firewire, etc.
Integrating a sound subsystem of high (or at least acceptable) quality directly in the chipset frees up precious PCI bandwidth even further.
This saves bandwidth for additional IDE controllers, SCSI controllers, video editing cards, additional graphics cards (for multi-monitor setups) and high quality sound solutions.
In other words, this will buy us more time while PCI Express is being introduced gradually into the mainstream market.
One important thing: if you purchase one of those "Deluxe" motherboards with all kinds of extra functionality integrated on-board, keep in mind that only the functionality integrated in the southbridge or connected to it through a high-speed internal interface will actually bypass the PCI bus. Many separate chips (such as on-board Promise or Highpoint softraid controllers) tend to be connected to the PCI bus internally, therefore still consuming PCI bandwidth. I'm not sure about many separate LAN-chips on many motherboards, though, because they might be connected to the southbridge through a separate bus, I'm not sure. Could somebody else here provide some more accurate information on this, please?
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
I sure am glad that either my ears aren't sensitive enough to notice the differences between MP3 and CD, or that I just don't care enough about the differences. My wallet is happy with me. :)
Their calculation of ideal SNR is down by 2dB.
16 bits (ideal) gives an SNR of 16*6.02 + 1.76 = 98dB, not 96dB.
Many audio cards fool you into thinking that it plays music cleaner by running the output through a reverb module. I'm not sure if the reverb is driver-based or hardware-based, but it's almost always turned on as a default. I make music and it was driving me crazy until I realized that my cheap SB Live card was adding reverb. I had to go into the driver config to turn it off. Are you sure that your sound card wasn't set to "Hall" or "Small Room?"
In my opinion, the biggest difference between a sound card and the motherboard component sound is the number of channels it can play at the same time. Motherboard sound cards can often only play 4 channels simultaneously (two in stereo), while even a cheap sound card can usually play eight or ten channels simultaneously. This really comes into play when you're playing an MP3 while playing a game. If you're using a motherboard sound card then intermittant event sounds like gunfire will drop out.
OK, I can't resist. He should have used sr-convert to convert the audio. It would at least have sounded the same.
One thing that makes the difference between the sound cards is the quality of the analog phase. A sound card consists of a D/A converter followed by a filter followed by an analog amplifier.
First of all, the D/A converter can be good or bad. If it's bad, it's bad. Any D/A converter is going to be better -- introduce fewer artifacts of its own -- at the higher sampling rates it supports. That said, some software will pretend to support higher sampling rates than the hardware by doing the cheapest, dirtiest downsampling possible, and in this case your best bet is to downsample to a rate that the D/A actually supports.
The filter is supposed to get rid of most of the artifacts introduced by the D/A, but it is an analog filter, so it will either come down into your actual audio or it will leave some of the artifacts in place. Also, an analog filter tends to have fixed characteristics. Really good sound cards might select between multiple analog filters depending on the sampling rate, but the bad ones will use one filter for everything. This is why an 8 kHz file sounds so much better when you upsample it to 48 kHz. When the sampling rates are high to begin with, really good oversampling D/A converters can help by producing an area of minimum noise in which an analog filter can roll off gradually, but cheap D/A converters don't do that, and cheap filters can't take full advantage.
Then there's the amplifier. Any amplifier is going to introduce characteristics of its own, particularly at the low end. An amplifier would burn itself up if it tried to amplify DC, so there has to be a cutoff. Getting a cutoff down to 10Hz requires really large capacitors, so manufacturers face the temptation to use the small cheap capacitors and your frequency response starts rolling off around 100 Hz. Result? No bass. Sometimes they try to compensate for it with software bass boost, but this would be CPU-intensive and would also reduce the output power as a whole. Amplifiers can also have horrible midrange or treble characteristics.
So sound cards vary a lot, and you might want to check whether your sound card actually supports 48 kHz in hardware. If it doesn't, it may itself be doing the butchering (possibly with your drivers), and your best bet would be to downsample the input file and play it at 44.1, which hardware more commonly supports. On the other hand if you can load this voice file into Cool Edit and see the artifacts in the spectral display, then the guy used a cheap sample converter.
Good luck.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Most motherboards that have 1 PCI slot (like my FV25) have everything you need for a normal computer (video, tv out, audio, LAN, USB, FireWire, etc.) built into them. This allows you to upgrade a single aspect of the computer to specialize its use. I upgraded the video on mine for a better gaming experience. This is an effective way to save money without sacrificing performance, but getting rid of upgradability. Motherboards with more slots on them are more expensive than an integrated motherboard, because you need to buy all the components. I could buy a silent Via Epia M6000 for $130 or I could get a bigger mobo ($50), a graphics card ($50), NIC ($20), CPU ($40), sound card($20), USB/Firewire card ($10), etc. and it would be much more expensive, louder, hotter, and less efficient than the Epia solution. The non-integrated system may perform better, but the average user doesn't need SCSI RAID, two monitors, and gigabit ethernet. There's no need to pay for stuff you won't use.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
Why not just wire it the CD end of a CD audio cable to the PC Speaker output on the Motherboard?
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.