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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)"
I spent so many years with no audio on any system, that the first hardware that had it was a shock: KDE starts with a bongo riff?!
All those years I thought those gears made a different sound.
Soli Deo Gloria
BTW, how many slots do we really need? With so many USB peripherals, PCI and especially ISA slots aren't the important resources they once were.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Try the following:
1) play mp3 through decent stereo straight from (Quicksilver) Mac.
2) Burn same Mp3 to CD and play through same stereo.
from CD is quite a lot better.....
Why?
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
"onboard m/b sound is not as bad as it sounds"
Oh, and buy this monitor too... I know it's scratched and can't seem to show the colour blue... But trust me, the picture's not as bad as it looks.
My comps have always had good onboard sound. I never understood why anyone would make a motherboard without it in the first place. I realize some of today's really high quality sound cards have some things you just wouldn't find on a built-on, but there's really no excuse for lack of at least basic audio support.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
As far as I'm concerned, it makes no odds these days whether you have the latest soundblaster or some cheapo onboard beast. Unless you have high quality speakers (which I imagine the average computer user doesn't) the difference is neglibile.
:-)
Of course, I can't tell the difference between a 128 and a 160 mp3, so who am I to speak?
Not only can you save a pci card, it is also cheaper and less of a hassle a lot of times. Some motherboards have excellent on board audio, such as the P4S8X I think it really depends on if you think its worth it. I can do fine with just the bios speaker going beep beep beep.
I built myself a new pc about 6 months ago, after doing some research I went for an NForce 2 based board with on board sound and could not be happier with it. I'm not an audiophile (deaf in one ear) but I do use it for games, music and for watching telly and movies.
My previous pc's soundcard was a soundblaster pci 128, and it doesn't compare well. The NForce 2 on board sound worked flawlessly as soon as I installed the driver. The pci 128 had very picky drivers, some of which needed to be installed in a certain order, if not it wouldn't work with my tv card. It was always a bit flaky but that could just have been my card.
As for bad things about the NForce 2 sound, well I haven't tried setting up 5.1 because I don't need it (and don't have the speaker equipment to support it). I'm glad tho because after reading the mobo manual it looks very complicated. I reckon this is where seperate sound cards have an advantage over on board.
It was good enough when I was a kid, and it's good enough now!
Try telling that to a Mac user... that'd be fun...
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.
-
I bought the new MSI 865 NEO2 FSIR board, which includes the wonders of 6-channel sound, Optical in/out, Coax in/out, and pin headers so I can plug the front audio ports in too. I bought my Audigy when I was using the Abit TH7II which only had pretty basic sound. Now the Audigy seems a bit excessive. I do use the Audigy Drive a lot though, mainly for music recording. But I do that so rarely its not all that much of a concern.
As for quality, onboard sound is pretty good these days. I've not tested the onboard stuff with this board, but other boards I've seen (heard) have been on a par with the Audigy. I know a lot of people are quick to badmouth Creative soundcards, but I like them. the ASIO support is very good for latenty-less recording/playback. I'm not sure this is something the onboard sound chipsets could manage so well.
I bought my first motherboard with onboard sound recently, ECS K7SOM+ (it's also got onboard networking, graphics and even a built-in AMD processor that's soldered in (only on some of these boards... the k7som is also available as a normal motherboard) because I want a cheapo one faster than my current P233 (go on... laugh... it runs Dreamweaver, Word, Paint Shop Pro, Counterstrike and everything else along those lines so I don't care) that I can upgrade later.
:-)
I was impressed with the onboard audio, given that I am still a SoundBlaster fan. The only problems I have are driver problems with some ancient games (i.e. ones where you still have to SET BLASTER=). Can you believe that I can't get the original Syndicate running with sound? Disgusting.
Given that I'm used to running P233 / P500's with decent VooDoo's, the built-in sis740 3D graphics also impressed me, the sheer brute force of a 1.2GHz processor means I can run games that the P500 with Voodoo 3500 can't handle as well.
I see built-in audio & networking as identical to the convential... after all, audio cards are just fairly low speed Digital-Analog or Analog-Digital convertors. Built-in video is good enough for business/office use, as far as I can see but for HalfLife 2 I can of course see that you're gonna need a decent, up-to-date, DX9 card.
My next upgrade to this computer will be to remove the motherboard and make a router out of it, buy one that has built-in audio + networking + an AGP slot + 6 PCI slots and put in the fastest processor I can afford. That way, I can use all of my existing bits from this computer.
Finding a MB with that many PCI slots isn't hard but it isn't every board that has it. Considering that I need to continue to use my existing 2 PCI network cards (Intel EtherExpress Pro's), at least one PCI RAID card (onboard RAID would be used as well), possibly a PCI TV card, I wouldn't want to have to use up another for a Soundblaster card when I can just use the onboard audio.
If you're a serious audio user (i.e. work in a recording studio), I can see that onboard audio is like telling a photographer to use a disposable camera. Otherwise, I really don't see the point.
One of the biggest things I like about modern PC's is that they're just like lego. You can buy the motherboard, CPU, sound card, video card, etc... you want, stick them all together, and hey presto! It works! And more importantly it gives me choice.
Motherboards should have nothing on them except lots of slots. I like my computers modular.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
probably need an adapter in the near future.
for quite some time now and I mean I've sure found the same thing. I can't seem to hear the difference between audio out and the rest of the hardware plugged into my stereo. Seems like 5.1 onboard is coming of age being analog^W digital and all ... erm ...
... nevermind
*thud*
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
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
The article doesn't seem to mention that soundfont capability is a good feature to have.
I know soundfonts might be a proprietary thing, but for many musicians, they constitute a must-have.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Telling your friends you have a "Sound Blaster Audigy 2 with Inspire 6.1" speakers is more impressive then preaching about the quality of an on board card.
MSI actually has a few boards with high quality 5.1 surround sound cards on board.
For 75% of users on board is going to be just fine...they won't even notice the difference.
I've built 10+ PCs for people around town, but I can't say that I have defaulted to onboard audio more then just a couple of times. I don't know why, just seemed like such a cheap way to go. My users wouldn't have ever known the difference though.
For the 25% of us who are music enthusiasts or at least wannabes, we can spend ridiculous amounts of money on better equipment...and there is always the added bonus of bragging rights.
You hear that you stupid on board audio users?! My sound card is freaking better then your crap.
Ahh..that felt good.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
I think onboard sound is adequate because most people plug in cheap speakers that aren't able to take advantage of any recent technilogical advances in audio
Audio has reached a point where cheap is good enough for most people. (sorry for bad grammer or bad spelling but it's 7:49 am, I haven't slept yet, and I'm quite drunk)
----
Squirrel
Both things are ICs. Chips that do some work. Mobos these days have an AC97 chip on board (it's just a mixer and ADC/DAC. It's not that bad tho. 18bits...) What if it was an SB audigy 2 on board? Or
Doesn't matter where it is located.
It DOES matter tho, if the DAC/ADC circuits are isolated.
so onboard DSP processing with external (or at least very well isolated DAC/ADC) is the best deal.
However, do note some people like to listen to their computer working... (you can hear all those funny noises in the electrical circuits due to resonance. It's very interesting.)
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
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.
If your not getting noise from the CPU or other devices, then onboard is fine for listening to music.
If you are are a musician doing recordings, spend some dough and get a high quality external sound D/A converter.
There really is not difference between pci sound cards and onboard sound. External sound is where the real difference is made.
is that you got audio working on Linux.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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.
My home-built system is running an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, which handles 5.1 on hardware. If I wanted to turn my computer into a home cinema or have surround sound for my games, I wouldn't even *need* one of them there fancy sound cards.
MB audio really depends on what mb you have, but these days they manage to cram so much on motherboards it's insane... Back in my days you didn't have motherboards! You just had boards of woods and you madez furniture out of them!
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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I tend to (dis)like anything onboard as much as the next slashdotter, but I've tried many soundcards, on and offboard (PC only, dunno about Macs), and the sound difference I feel is tiny enough to say that 90% of all regular PC users wouldn't even know the difference.
I would say that the big difference to sound quality lies on the amplifiers, and of course, on the speakers.
Myself, I use a Delta44 into an Alesis RA-100 which provides very low noise, and JBL speakers. Sound is as close to perfect as I would wish, meaning that it would only get better if I built new walls around here.
That is what I think makes the difference. There is no way a decent amplifier and good speakers can compare to the crappy $5 PC "amplified speakers".
There is one last difference: Impedance. But then again the crappy speakers wouldn't work with good cards.
But for Joe 16bit, onboard sound and SBLive! are just the same. (and yes, I own both of those too).
It's the same situation as onboard video: onboard sound is now good enough for most basic PC uses. Reality check- if you're happy using two small beige plastic no-name PC speakers powered by a tiny wall-wart, you will not be disappointed by onboard sound.
However, for anything that involves doing alot of audio playback (jukebox, DJ/broadcast, audio/video editing, theatre FX, intense gaming) you will very likely appreciate the quality of a better audio card.
On my PC I run two soundcards - a SB Live Value into some beige speakers mainly for Windoze & game sounds, and a M-Audio 2496 into a mixer, power amp and JBL speakers for doing editing, music-making and album transcription.
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 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've manage two computers here at home, mine and my partner's. My partner does multitrack sound editing, I'm a programmer who listens to music whilst coding plus uses soundboard for gaming (F1 2002 current fave). Mine is the most powerful one, hers get my old components. 16500 winmarks 01, fwiw.
Now, when updating our motherboards with the purchase of said Asus motherboard, I moved the Audigy into hers so as to replace the old SBLive she had before thinking the Soundstorm would be as good or better than the Audigy. Also, she needed quality of sound more than I so I thought it would be a good thing.
However, an Audigy 2 is now on the shopping list for her so that I can have my Audigy 1 back. Why? The Soundstorm sound quality is just BAD. This is especially from a hifi point of view. My Grado Labs SR325s picks up hisses and noise from moving windows, programs loading etc, something that never happened before. My Audigy was just dead silent. And worst of all, the equaliser settings make everything sound distorted; in fact, music is flat out crap with a nasal metal sound with equaliser off; with EQ on I can get the nasal quality down a bit but it never approaches the natural sound of the Audigy.
Going Dolby Digital to my Cambridge Soundworks 3500 removes the hisses but the extremely poor equaliser (as compared to much more natural sounding base and treble of the Audigy) remains.
I've tested this using A-B comparisons, which is possible as the Audigy hooks up to the same miniamp by the 5.1 DIN whereas the Soundstorm uses Coaxial. Source is lossless compression ripped CDs - with the computers next to each others it's easy enough to press play at the same time and then just press the mute buttons as fit. And yes, the soundstorm _just can't match_ the natural sound of the audigy. No way.
I'm a bit of a hi fi nut, not terribly so compared to some but I've put in about A$20 000 into a Rotel hifi/home theatre system over the past 6 years and my Grado Labs are fantastic. Using the Audigy I could hardly pick the difference between that soundcard and my high end Sony Discman player, however with the Soundstorm there's just no point comparing - it's not high fidelity, at all.
In addition to playback, the microphone quality is clearly inferior to the Audigy, lots of hisses and just plain bad quality. This is tested with the help of Teamspeak and Plantronic's top of the line analogue headphone/mike (can't hold a candle to the Grados but it's comfy enough for gaming).
I really wonder what those who say motherboard based sound is comparable to standalone soundcards were smoking. They can't have that good ears, that's for sure! If it is a bad batch of the A7N8X Deluxe, please let me know. I'm extremely doubtful though.
Sorry for my long windedness, moderators - hope you find it somehow informative though.
ISO certified == THX certified
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. :)
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.
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