$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best

EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."

Comments

Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card, or even worse - rely on onboard sound.

My sound card - a Turtle Beech Catalina cost about what this does and was worth every penny, especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub.

Re:Sound Cards

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, onboard sound is getting better, for what that's worth. And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.

But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell. It's kind of like suggesting upgrading your monitor or video card if you're only going to be watching YouTube. Hopefully at least a few developers are using high quality sounds in their games...

Re:Sound Cards

[nulldaemon]

I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card because most people can't really hear the difference and get higher marginal returns putting that extra money in to a faster cpu/gpu.

Re:Sound Cards

[moderatorrater]

I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card, or even worse - rely on onboard sound Because its primary functions are gaming and programming, and neither of those would be seriously enhanced with a better sound card.

Re:Sound Cards

[schnikies79]

Because I would rather the computer be fast than sound like a home theater.

I have a desktop speaker pair and thats all I want and need. On board sound is just fine for me.

Re:Sound Cards

[MrKevvy]

re: "Because its primary functions are gaming and programming, and neither of those would be seriously enhanced with a better sound card."

Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory, which can lead to sound dropouts with multiple simultaneous voices, and even cause stuttering and FPS loss. Not that these aren't effects I've also seen with Creative "real" soundcard products though especially from the Live family. Creative's quality seems to have taken a nosedive since the SB16 days.

Re:Sound Cards

[mauthbaux]

Many people have asked why I have a moderately expensive sound system, and yet my TV is old enough to drink (seriously, it's a 15" 1986 panasonic with fake wood sides, pre-coax antenna connectors, and a slot underneath to store the remote). The answer I usually give is that ,"I wear glasses, not hearing aids. I'm going to favor the senses that still work properly."

So yeah, there are people like me out there that would upgrade the sound card before upgrading the CPU (or video card).

Re:Sound Cards

[McGiraf]

what?

Re:Sound Cards

[Jthon]

Most hardware soundcards also have sound buffers in system memory. I believe Creative's do as well unless something very explicitly uses their XRAM feature. The only game I know of that did so was one of the Battlefield games.

The processing/memory overhead is nothing if one has a modern dual/quad core with 2-4 GB of main memory. Most games aren't properly multithreaded anyway so it's not like you're stealing their CPU cycles.

The big difference between onboard/real sound has to do with the ADC/DACs and connectivity. For most people the onboard stuff is probably fine unless you have a really noisy mainboard, and if your onboard is doing DDL or some other digital output even that doesn't matter.

Of course for non-gaming situations such as pro-audio capture/editing there are other issues that make a dedicated card worth it. But you wouldn't buy yourself an x-fi gaming card for that.

Re:Sound Cards

[Symbha]

how does a (nice) external sound card slow your computer down?

Re:Sound Cards

[Shados]

Except that not all onboard audio steals RAM, not all onboard audio catches all the surrounding noise (you didn't say that, but everyone else does), and not all onboard audios cause stuttering. Most do come with a slight FPS loss (OH NOES! Crappy non-optimised games like Hellgates:London run at 97 fps on my machine, so they could do 100~! big freagin woohoo).

Seems like getting a decent motherboard may matter in this case. Investing in better speakers is probably more important than the sound card... unless you have a top notch 5/7.1 system, the soundcard will not be the bottleneck.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anne Honime]

Because most computers have noisy fans, that's why. Why would you buy an expensive card just to have the sound overlaid by a persistent "whizzzz" ?

Re:Sound Cards

[Trogre]

I still swear by my trusty 1999 SBLive. No pissing about with which process has /dev/snd/pcm* locked, nice hardware mixing and lovely sound.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub. Seems to me your choice of speakers invalidates your comments on sound cards. Bose is the creative of the speaker world: well known, heavily marketed, low quality.

Re:Sound Cards

[Sique]

As a matter of fact I ordered one computer to be without any soundcard at all, and in the most games I play I turn the sound off. And I never use the computer to play music. So what's the point in spending money on a sound card?

Re:Sound Cards

[drgonzo59]

Because for really good audio sound cards inside a computer case are not a good idea so might as well go with a crappy one for testing or just use the bundled one. In general D/A conversion needs to be performed outside the computer case, in a specialized box. So that is why people spend tons of money on a computer then spend a lot more money on a USB / Ethernet digital audio platform.

Re:Sound Cards

[FishWithAHammer]

My sound card - a Turtle Beech Catalina cost about what this does and was worth every penny, especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub.

No highs, no lows--must be Bose!

Re:Sound Cards

[mishikal]

Exactly. If I want home theater sound, I stream audio from my computer to my home theater in the living room. Works great.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't, but I can spend more money on the board/processor/ram when I'm not spending in on a sound card and speakers.

Re:Sound Cards

[Metasquares]

I don't see any point in using it for pre-generated sound, because, as you said, the audio has already been mangled.

What I find a high-end soundcard indispensable for, however, is recording audio.

Re:Sound Cards

[Symbha]

Ah, ya... external soundcards are not for people that do not care about sound. :)

Re:Sound Cards

[Metasquares]

With the glasses, your vision should still work properly, though - assuming it's just a visual acuity problem, at least.

I have an old TV because I just don't watch much TV :)

Re:Sound Cards

[fooDfighter]

Not to be an ass but you should get better speakers.

Re:Sound Cards

[TheNetAvenger]

Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory

You are correct most of the time; however, there are a few onboard sound chipsets that provide their own buffers and hardware and interface to the mainboard via a PCI interface just like a real sound card, because they are real sound cards.

The usual implementation of the AC97 specification would be an example of what you are talking about, where older onboard technologies using Yamaha chipsets were complete solutions, even having dedicated RAM for GM Wave samples.

Re:Sound Cards

[billcopc]

You almost sound like a troll, but i'll bite.

Turtle beach = YES. I don't know why they bother, but this tiny company makes great little sound cards. Simple, but clean. Their sound quality puts many "pro" cards to shame.

Bose = GOD NO! I mean, if you like the Bose sound, that's your preference and that's fine, but the term "playback quality" refers to reproducing the original sound as accurately as possible, something Bose speakers don't even try to accomplish.

The thing with sound is there are two main schools of thought: those who seek accurate reproduction, and those who seek "pleasant" reproduction. Studio monitors, high-end headphones and some brands of tower speakers shoot for accurate sound, which many people find cold and dry. Bose speakers typically produce "happy" sound, by using a gazillion drivers and psychoacoustic sound processing (think SRS).

Creative's X-Fi also specializes in this "happy" sound through the use of the so-called Crystallizer. It takes normal, clean audio, and adds the sonic equivalent of glitter dust to appeal to the aural magpies of this world. A few people dislike it (like me), but many people enjoy the effect it has on popular recordings.

So then, what do non-Bose non-Creative users lack ? Happy sound. I personally don't miss any of that stuff, and I have zero issues with my featureless onboard 8-channel sound and my cold-sounding high-end speakers. Even the Asus sound card doesn't tempt me one bit, because the features it offers, I don't want. It would be nice if a sound card could be just that: a sound processing accelerator, but in 2008 the CPU is more than capable of handling the cheap bandpass filters and flanging effects Creative calls "environmental audio". The fact that even Creative uses software EAX emulation for its cheaper products is proof of this, and the only reason it doesn't work on other cards is because of licensing/IP issues.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that a real sound card is needed for gaming. But most people are surprisingly deaf and can't hear the difference, and so most game companies don't want to spend the time and money on proper audio.

One of the best games to demonstrate the difference between onboard and hardware-accelerated audio is Bioshock. Using my onboard Realtek HD with 5.1 speakers, I get a muddy mess of sounds. I couldn't stand it and decided to get an X-Fi and the difference is amazing. I can hear the difference between sounds coming from, say, down the stairs or just round the corner. Watery echos and long hallways sound like the would.

Sound is not just some bonus feature, like DX10 vs DX9. It adds significantly to your perception. I still remember the exhilaration when I upgraded to 5.1 sound and was able to spin around and frag someone just behind me because of the accurate positional audio. And there are of course stories of blind people playing video games entirely by sound.

Re:Sound Cards

[Just Some Guy]

I have a desktop speaker pair and thats all I want and need.

Ouch. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but that would drive me to drink. I have a nice set of Aura Aspect 20/40 speakers (with under-the-desk subwoofer). They sound better than most home theaters I've been around, but only cost about $100 or so when I bought them. I like to code to music - for some reason, The Crystal Method's "Vegas" just makes the LOC flow - and they're the difference between hearing a symphony live versus over the phone.

They're also plugged into the speaker outs of whatever an iMac comes with. See? I'm really not that picky. I just can't stand the horrible sound of your average desktop speakers. Do yourself a favor and go buy some good-sounding gear. You don't have to pay an arm and a leg for decent stuff.

Re:Sound Cards

[CharlieG]

Why? The ONLY sound my computer is setup for is "Beep" - Don't want any more than that - just enough to get my attention. I don't game on it - or listen to music - I surf, and I write software - silence is golden

Re:Sound Cards

[jandrese]

I just wish USB soundcards weren't such a hack. It always seemed to me that firewire would be perfect for external sound cards, but nobody seems to do that, at least not at the consumer level.

Re:Sound Cards

[Just Some Guy]

Fair enough. I'm just not anywhere quiet enough to get real silence, so I cover it with something I can zone out on.

Re:Sound Cards

[Hackeron]

I find the sound of the sblive very muddy and the treble roll-off is very noticeable. I guess it's a choice of performance or quality - I'm very happy with the analog stereo quality of my M-Audio Revolution 5.1 but I do have to piss about with /dev/snd/pcm and anything that doesn't use openal or alsa doesn't work at all (like Enemy Territory) :(

Maybe when the driver is released for Linux, this Asus card will become the first to offer decent sound quality with hardware mixing? - Creative are screwed :)

Re:Sound Cards

[element-o.p.]

Maybe not at the consumer level, but there are plenty of Firewire at the amateur/semi-pro musician level. Check out http://www.musiciansfriend.com/, http://www.zzounds.com/ and http://www.sweetwater.com/ for examples.

Re:Sound Cards

[billcopc]

If you're concerned about audio buffers "stealing" RAM on your gaming rig, then a sound card is the least of your problems.

It's funny that you should mention the SB16. SB16 was a crap card, but it was immensely popular and had great developer support. It sounded like shit, but it was popular and we should all know by now that a successful product is not necessarily a quality product, it just has to be well marketed and priced, in fact quality will often work against you.

If games could grow some balls and use their own sound processing libs, it wouldn't matter which sound card you owned as they would only be used as DACs. Crysis does its own sound processing and thus it outputs the exact same audio on any sound card, which means the onus for sound quality is on your DACs, amps and speakers, not some ghetto firmware/driver lock-in solution.

Re:Sound Cards

[Z34107]

There are some nifty approaches to onboard sound. The Striker Extreme series motherboards (also from Asus, conspiracy?!) come with onboard audio on a riser card. It plugs into what's essentially a PCIe 1x slot, but backwards so you can't stick something else into it by accident.

Having the "onboard" audio on its own card means that it's distanced from motherboard electrical noise, and for the "range compressed to hell" stuff it sounds just fine.

Re:Sound Cards

[IronChef]

And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.

The cool thing about Dolby Digital Live encoding is the game doesn't have to support Dolby Digital. The sound card and drivers magically remix positional DirectSound events into a Dolby Digital bitstream.

In other words, I plug my computer into my AV receiver with 1 audio cable and surround sound Just Works in all my games.

But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell.

Even if the sound quality was terrible I'd want to know if there was a level 3 sentry behind me. Surround sound makes games more enjoyable.

Re:Sound Cards

[sr. bigotes]

I don't think most sound cards actually include any appreciable amount of onboard memory, so this is not really true. I may be confused by Creative's marketing for it's highest-end cards, though (which included up to 64MB of RAM). I took their ads to mean that sound cards generally did not have memory and used system RAM for buffering. In that case, the only function they provide is post-processing. Asus's argument is that with multicore processors being nearly standard equipment, and most of the processing power going under-utilized in the higher-end machines that would have sound cards, the extra hardware processing is not useful (Microsoft obviously thinks this is true as well.)

Of course, I might be wrong about the RAM thing, but I do know that the Creative X-Fi XXXTREMEMusicXXX card I bought two years has at most 2MB of RAM onboard. I am certain its presence will have no affect on my FPS.

Re:Sound Cards

[GalacticCmdr]

I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card, or even worse - rely on onboard sound. My sound card - a Turtle Beech Catalina cost about what this does and was worth every penny, especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub.

Okay, that is fair but why couple a good sound card with crappy speakers - you have the equivalent of a German car with an American transmission. Buying a good sound card but then not mating it with good speakers is rather pointless. It is not that Bose speakers are not crappy, they are definitely not that, but they are not good by any stretch of the imagination. They make a perfect match for on-board sound. If you want a good setup then you need both a good sound card and good speakers - plus not listen to MP3s.

Re:Sound Cards

[v1]

I just recently bought a set of Logitec Z4 speakers, and I am very impressed with them. They have a good deal of volume capacity (not that I blast them all the time), good bass, but also has good mid and high range as well. Not too expensive either.

Good for movies, but also good for gaming. Sends the cat out of the room at a high rate of speed when something gets blown up.

Re:Sound Cards

[dgatwood]

USB or ethernet? Yikes. USB is frequently very unreliable for audio. The only place where Ethernet audio makes sense is if you're wiring up an arena or something. When you have to run 16 channels of audio to dozens of amplifiers and speakers all across an area that's a quarter mile wide, Ethernet is the perfect solution. For most recording purposes, though, the much higher cost of Ethernet-based gear just doesn't make much sense if you only need to run signals to the next room over.

IMHO, FireWire is generally the best way to go for consumer, prosumer, and professional audio recording purposes up to about 32 channels. Above that limit, I'd probably go with either PCI or PCIe gear with a breakout box... but only gear for which PCIe is an option since PCI is being gradually phased out in favor of the more modern PCIe....

Re:Sound Cards

[dubbreak]

I completely agree. I don't understand why anyone would sped exorbitant amounts of money on a "gamer" sound card (that's what creative markets to pretty much exclusively) when you can buy a decent card for recording for the same or less.

I have an M-Audio delta 44 and I love it. Sound q is excellent and the 1/4" analogue ins and outs work great for me (I have a pro-audio amp for my computer speakers). If I wanted something more basic for another computer build I'd buy the revolution 5.1 card. It supports Sensaura, EAX, DirectSound and A3D and I'd bet if you did measurements was lower noise than a Creative card.

Creative is nothing more than a brand. They leverage their name to sell cheap crap to consumers at inflated prices. Any educated buyer would NOT buy a Creative product.

Re:Sound Cards

[jgoemat]

I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card, or even worse - rely on onboard sound.

Really on-board sound has come a long way. You might as well be asking why people don't use portable CD players anymore. Unless you're willing to spend a great deal more on speakers than the $90 for the sound card, and you have room to setup surround sound, then the difference really isn't that big. I'm perfectly happy with my USB headset, but I'd hate to lose my 24" Dell monitor.

Re:Sound Cards

[MightyYar]

I never had "golden ears", and now my high frequency hearing is going away completely with age.

So yeah, it would be wasted money for me. Though I do have to admit being irritated by poor-quality mp3s... especially anything with cymbals.

Besides, I have a pretty good stereo hooked up to my TV in the living room. I'd have to spend a lot more than the $100 I spent on my computer speakers in order to hear a decent sound card.

Re:Sound Cards

[krelian]

Because its primary functions are gaming and programming, and neither of those would be seriously enhanced with a better sound card. Looks like someone hasn't left the basement in a while...

Re:Sound Cards

[jhol13]

I'd much rather use S/PDIF (optical) output and separate amplifier than buy expensive sound card.

You'll most likely get better D/A and the (galvanic) separation from the PC can only be good.

Re:Sound Cards

[Kabal`]

I do this but it has its downsides. Very few games can mix 5.1 over spdif so you won't get surround in games this way. Works fine for movies and sounds great even on on-board sound though.

Re:Sound Cards

[lantastik]

I'm laughing inside. You said...Bose.

Re:Sound Cards

[modecx]

If you're really into recording useful things on a regular basis, you're probably using something like an external firewire (or USB, eek) audio interface... Because even with a good card, there's just too much electronic noise roaming around inside the average computer case, and most of it is caused by shitty power supplies--so the noise is conveniently often right in the audible range--and most internal sound cards are not very well insulated. It's not such a big deal for skype or voip or most anything else the average joe does with audio in, because those ranges often get compressed out, and due to the nature of the use, it's not a big deal in the first place. The external boxes also usually have the added bonus of microphone phantom power, amps, and make it pretty easy to use a quality mic or other pro-quality recording gear, at relatively little expense.

Re:Sound Cards

[ZipR]

If it's done right, mp3 audio is indistinguishable from the source for the *vast* majority of people. Ask some of the fine people at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/, they'll tell you.

Re:Sound Cards

[BlueCollarCamel]

You don't use sound. But I do.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

There has not been a soundcard out there, that has it's own dedicated ram, in measurable quantities since the SB AWE-64.

Look at most soundcards, can you find the ram?...I can't..which basically means, it's not there.

There may be a small amount of SRAM, for sample parameters, DSP parameters, etc, but don't fool yourself, the driver is using system memory for primary buffer storage.

All most soundcards are nowadays, is a stripped down DSP, an ADC/DAC combo, and that's about it..think along the lines of 'Winmodem', but for soundcards.

The cheap ones do everything in software.

The mid-range ones are somewhat accelerated.

The high end ones are mini stripped down DSP's.

Re:Sound Cards

[enoz]

Just look at how many people use iPods with stock standard "iPod earbuds". There's your answer in plain white and grey.

Re:Sound Cards

[SanityInAnarchy]

The sound card and drivers magically remix positional DirectSound events into a Dolby Digital bitstream.

Which, again, isn't going to be supported by all games. Not all games are using DirectSound, for one -- or DirectX at all. I realize that's a minority...

Even if the sound quality was terrible I'd want to know if there was a level 3 sentry behind me. Surround sound makes games more enjoyable.

I've found that headphones are generally just as good, especially considering how fast I can turn around to check in FPS games. And you kind of need a headset for team games, anyway -- I'm not entirely sure how you'd integrate that into a good surround system.

Re:Sound Cards

[SanityInAnarchy]

And why would you want to do that when there are better codecs (some free), in places where sequenced music might be better anyway...

In short, why would you use MP3 when you have total control over the software on which the music (or other sound) will be played back? In particular, why would you pay a license to use MP3, when you can use Vorbis for free?

Re:Sound Cards

[adolf]

It doesn't matter.

If you're happy enough to have all of your sound processing done in software instead of with dedicated DSPs, just make sure that your next motherboard has some manner of digital output -- either optical or coaxial. Plug this straight into your home theater receiver, or a dedicated DAC[1], and the quality of the sound card generally just ceases to matter (at least for stereo material).

[1]: Myself, I use an Audio Alchemy DDE v1.1 which I picked up on Ebay 6 or 8 years ago for a song. It does a good job of converting 44.1 or 48KHz PCM audio into a very nice pair of analog outputs on RCA jacks.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen.

http://0st.biz/clipfarm/creative-labs-vs-daniel_k/

Re:Sound Cards

[Raenex]

You don't have to pay an arm and a leg for decent stuff. Best PC speakers I ever had were a pair of $20 Boka 81000, bought something like 10 years ago. Music sounded fine. They had bass and treble controls. Good power. Sadly they broke. I tried cheap speakers made in China that I got from Best Buy, but they sounded like shit. Even $50 speakers weren't nearly as good.

Seriously, I don't understand how something could be so cheap yet so good, but now I can't find a replacement. I remember when I bought them the guy behind the counter laughed, and I thought he was mocking me for my purchase, but he was just amused at what a great deal they were. I thought at the time "whatever, they're just desktop speakers", but man do I miss them!

Re:Sound Cards

[Lord of Hyphens]

You're right, not all soundcards are created equal... but I'll still prefer my dedicated piece of hardware. No offense to you, but it's down to preference at that point. That aside, I'm sorry you're playing Hellgate: London.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

most gamers who go to such lengths to preserve fps have ~4gb of system ram anyways with a 32bit OS, so that extra 100mb or so wouldn't be used anyways. And if your going with an x64 OS your losing framerate due to shoddy drivers.

As far as audio quality goes, how can you hear it over the 50db cooler you've got sitting on that overclocked CPU?

Re:Sound Cards

[Molochi]

8 years ago there were many reasons to use a soundcard, even a cheap one, over onboard audio. Today the cpu hit and the audio quality from an integrated audio chip is acceptable. The reason people are willing to buy an expensive computer with integrated audio is because there are so many other much more interesting and useful things to throw your money at. If the cost of a computer with all the things I want on it exceeds my budget, the first thing I'd cut is the soundcard.

Re:Sound Cards

[a whoabot]

Oh God, Hellgate was the most buggy and just generally bad game I've played since Shadow of the Beast II on Sega Genesis.

Re:Sound Cards

[ZipR]

I'm not advocating for the use of mp3. My point is that because it's an mp3 does not by default mean that it is poor quality.

Re:Sound Cards

[c_forq]

I hear this from audiophiles a lot, but everything I have studied about psychoacoustics totally supports everything I hear from Bose. I think audiophiles get caught up by the fact that Bose doesn't really care about the sound waves coming from their gear, they care about the perception of the sound waves coming from their gear. (Examples of why this difference matters: the inability of humans to distinguish between a sine wave and a saw wave at almost all frequencies and the inability to correctly echolocate a mono sound panned through stereo speakers.

Re:Sound Cards

[BLKMGK]

Amen! I use a decent set of headphones, USB at that. Then I don't disturb the woman and I've not spent but a few bux. If I want GOOD sound from my HTPC that's as simple as hooking the optical output to my receiver - problem solved. I know it cannot do that super high end audio tracks and that HDMI is required for that but in my small living room this rocks - I don't need 7.1 worth of speakers.

To each their own, I'm just glad someone is going to perhaps provide some competition and hopefully some decent DRIVERS. Even on Windows Creative has sucked for YEARS and removing their crap damn near takes an act of GOD or a custom program written by a 3rd party. If I see Creative listed as the onboard sound for a board I'm considering I put it at the bottom of the list and if I'm forced to buy it I disable the thing in the BIOS straight away. A real shame Creative lost their way, all the better it's ASUS as I've had good luck lately with their hardware.

Re:Sound Cards

[fireboy1919]

It doesn't matter.

If you're happy enough to have all of your sound processing done in software instead of with dedicated DSPs, just make sure that your next motherboard has some manner of digital output -- either optical or coaxial.

Which is why the great grandparent post was talking about input. You can get great sound out of a computer using el-cheapo cards, but inputs? Spend at least $100 for two, and add at least $75 for each additional pair...and even then it may not work with your hardware. Pretty much *every* card on the market has people that complain that they can't it to work. Figuring out what's actually going to work is a nightmare.

I don't see why that has to be so hard. Can't we do the same thing coming into the machines that we do going out?

Re:Sound Cards

[tuomoks]

A good answer. I have no idea where I'm as a listener - no games but I need my music, mainly on my a couple hundred bucks headphones using professional sound gear (my sons!) but then, sometimes I really like the commercial, modified for enjoyment sound? Definitely NOT when playing Ella or classical (you want all you can get) and something which has been recorded / saved without compression (old or new) but, just for background music. The funny thing, old Turtle Beach seems to work best when I don't have access to some nice, external Firewire gear - a couple sound cards in box but lately, maybe getting old, Turtle Beach has been sitting in my work computer. Each their own!

Re:Sound Cards

[T-Bone-T]

I haven't purchased a game in a while, but I was unaware you could choose what format the sound effects used. Oh wait, you can't. That for the developer to decide.

Re:Sound Cards

[Travoltus]

External sound cards are for people who want their cpu's RAM to be working on other things than processing sound.

Re:Sound Cards

[kklein]

Preach it!

I'll go one further. It's not just that they don't provide value for money, Creative actually makes the worst soundcards I have ever, ever used. They aren't as good as the onboard RealTeks that come with your mobo, and of course can't hold a candle to a proper M-Audio (I used to use a Delta 1010). Both of these options sound better and install with less fuss and operate with less trouble.

To hell with Creative!

Re:Sound Cards

[Eskarel]

Onboard sound can use cpu cycles when you don't want it to, buy yourself a cheap dedicated card and you're fine.

Re:Sound Cards

[adolf]

No - it's not hard. But it's also not very popular.

I'd wager that most folks, these days, never do any serious recording of audio. It's just not something that there are very many practical applications for in a modern world. And even when they do want to bring analog audio into a computer, it's probably only as a part of a video capture or VOIP rig, and they're just not paying much attention to the fidelity. And even when they do have a need to do serious recording and are paying attention, only the most glaring amounts of audible noise and distortion are likely to be noticed. People are generally pretty tolerant of relatively bad-sounding audio.

If the need were more common or they were paying more attention, cheap sound cards would commonly have the same huge number of reasonably good inputs as they currently do outputs, because that's what the market would demand..

Myself, I've been looking for a decent, cheap 4-channel sound input into the PC for years -- I've got a few old quad recordings of various rock music on 1/4" reels which I really want to listen to, but I will only do so in the presence of something with which to archive it with (the tapes are so old that it's not unlikely that playing them even once will destroy them).

Lately, the additional need for 4 or 8 (though preferably 12 or 16) inputs has risen as I'd like to begin making some live recordings of a band that I've been working with.

It's not hard to find sound card or external Firewire/USB box which can do these things -- it's just hard to justify the expense.

But it's not the expense which is keeping people away from recording on a PC, but rather just the fact that these sorts of tasks are esoteric enough that most people will never do them. Therefore, the market is, and is likely to remain, very thin.

Like RAID storage, backup devices, SAS drives, DVI-connected LCD monitors configured with 1:1 pixel ratios (instead of BlurryVision and/or FatPersonVision), most folks just don't have any reason to care about this aspect of computing.

Re:Sound Cards

[dgatwood]

Pretty much *every* card on the market has people that complain that they can't it to work. Figuring out what's actually going to work is a nightmare.

In the recording interface category, as long as you have a decent TI-based FireWire card (NOT a combo card) that doesn't share an IRQ with video or a USB port, anything FireWire should be pretty reliable, with the possible exception of DICE II-based hardware. As for me, I'm a big fan of MOTU's gear. Low latency, low CPU overhead, generally well-written drivers, reliable hardware.... As with anything, though, YMMV. :-)

I don't see why that has to be so hard. Can't we do the same thing coming into the machines that we do going out?

The problem is that the sound going out from the cheapo sound cards sucks, too, but it is transient and only one channel at a time, so you ignore it. When you have to hear the brittle sound of cheap electrolytic and/or ceramic caps in the audio path on the way in plus the same thing going out, it adds up. Build up a dozen tracks with that brittle distortion, and you're talking about a heck of a spitty sound when all is said and done. Thus, the quality of input is a couple of orders of magnitude more important than the quality of the output in terms of what we hear.

Compounding that issue, the signal coming in is not going to be pre-normalized on its way in at just below 0dBFS. You're going to leave a lot of headroom to avoid clipping. That means that you'll be bringing that level up, and the noise along with it, generally by at least a dozen dB. Now the quality of the inputs is at least one more order of magnitude more important.

Compounding the problem further, a lot of home recording folks use dynamic mics, which among other things tend to have poor high frequency response. The first thing they do, then, is add a HF boost EQ to the track. All that high frequency distortion from the cheap caps just got boosted. Another order of magnitude.

There's a reason that reasonably good recording gear starts at about $250-300 for a couple of channels and goes up from there. The economies of scale for people who actually care about multitrack recording are just not there. People who are willing to put up with lousy sound because they just want to record from a tape or CD once in a blue moon are in the majority, and the analog upgrades needed to make those devices sound good by themselves would add probably $30 to the manufacturing cost even in volume, so why double the base price for everybody just to make their devices sound good if only 1% care about it? Would anybody buy a SoundBlaster if they started at $100+?

As a result, you get this split between the recording interface manufacturers and the cheap sound card manufacturers. One does the R&D to make their EIN and THD figures clean while the other doesn't. One builds really stable, externally-lockable clocks into their devices while the other throws a cheap crystal in with the most primitive PLL they can manage and says "good enough". When you add it all up and divide by the number of people in each category---those who care and those who don't---the prices come out just about right, unfortunately.

Re:Sound Cards

[hcdejong]

Bose's genius lies in making their speakers sound spectacular and impressive to the untrained ear. Their 'indirect sound' trickery gives you "stereo" in the entire room, at the expense of a muddled sound. I haven't heard their surround systems, but the problem's bound to be even worse there.
Similarly, the frequency response of their speakers makes them stand out when you compare speakers, but pay a bit more attention and you'll notice the frequency response is as flat as a mountain range.
IOW, they don't care about what sounds good, they care about marketing to the unwashed masses.

Re:Sound Cards

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

Looks like a great gamers card, as well as an all around sound card. i prefer the hardware accelerated everything model for computer components, but Creative seem incapable of pulling it off. go asus!

Re:Sound Cards

[Atti K.]

Amen! I use a decent set of headphones, USB at that. Then I don't disturb the woman You mean, the woman doesn't disturb YOU, right?

Re:Sound Cards

[Lonewolf666]

In general D/A conversion needs to be performed outside the computer case, in a specialized box.

I think shielding the audio circuits and filtering the power supply can go a long way. The review in TFA confirms this, as they measured a S/N ratio of more than 110 db for the Asus Xonar.
This is better than what the CD audio format can give you, and for that double blind tests suggest that the inherent limitations are not audible. In particular, I'm referring to a test by the Stereoplay hi-fi magazin several years ago, where a high quality analog source was digitized, converted back to analog and then compared to the original.
Unfortunately the article is not online, so i cannot give you a link :-(

Re:Sound Cards

[GreatBunzinni]

Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory, which can lead to sound dropouts with multiple simultaneous voices, and even cause stuttering and FPS loss.

Have you noticed that nowadays a 1GB DIMM costs less than 30 euros, which is less than 25% of your lower-end "good" gaming sound card? Moreover, if you have enough disposable income to the point of believing that it's acceptable to spend over 100 euros for a soundcard then it is safe to say that you also find it reasonable to dump that kind of cash on other components. That means that your gaming rig is already far beyond average and your game play isn't affected by minor FPS drops due to onboard sound.

Let's face it: this "we need high end audio equipment to play games" deal comes right out of the audiophile playbook. Purchasing high end audio for gaming doesn't make absolutely any sense, technical or economical, it doesn't bring any added value and the need for it is nothing but a myth perpetuated by gut feelings and exaggerations.

Re:Sound Cards

[ichigo 2.0]

DVI-connected LCD monitors configured with 1:1 pixel ratios (instead of BlurryVision and/or FatPersonVision)

NVIDIA cards have a setting in the control panel that disables scaling, inserting black borders on the sides that need them. ATI probably has something similar.

Re:Sound Cards

[Eisenstein]

You mean that Bose doesn't rely on facts, physics or science, but on mubo-jumbo to sell their speaker and many of their buyers belief this? I agree with this.

Re:Sound Cards

[RocketRabbit]

Depends on the drivers. APSlive drivers really punch the same hardware up a lot.

Re:Sound Cards

[UncleRage]

And here's another voice from the choir.

My main sound comes from a M-Audio Firewire Audiophile running into an Anthem preamp, Adcom amp and then into a set of B&W's for monitors.

What's my Audigy 2 used for? Skype.

Creative makes such trash.

Re:Sound Cards

[stewbacca]

Perhaps because not many people use their home computers as the hub of their hi-fi music systems (yet)? I've never understood why anyone would ever buy a sound card, period. I'm a gigging musician, and ANYTHING sound related that goes into my computer does so through outboard gear, and in through the firewire port. Soundcard-schmoundcard!

Re:Sound Cards

[stewbacca]

Presonus makes a lot of great firewire stuff. Check musiciansfriend, like the post below suggests.

Re:Sound Cards

[mopower70]

Because most of us, including gamers, don't need an expensive sound card. The subtle differences - and they are subtle to anyone who is not a hardcore audiophile - are not worth the price. Graphics card, memory, CPU all have a much better price performance payoff.

Re:Sound Cards

[stewbacca]

The last time the low quality of a sound card affected a video game for me was in 1998, playing the physics-intense Grand Prix Legends. That game required every last bit of processor power and a sound card upgrade usually helped free some up. Are games still like that? (I'm old now, and don't play anymore).

Re:Sound Cards

[stewbacca]

There's more to audio quality than surround sound capabilities...just sayin'...

Re:Sound Cards

[c_forq]

Their 'indirect sound' trickery gives you "stereo" in the entire room, at the expense of a muddled sound.

I would never describe what I hear from a Bose sound as muddled. One thing I know they do though is put the same sound through every indirect speaker, but louder through the direct speaker as a cue for echolocation. If it is not set up properly, or if your perception of sound varies significantly from most the population than this could present a big problem. You shouldn't hear muddled sound though, as the brain does an excellent job at filtering out a lot of sound - in the case of a direct/indirect system the result should be clean sound or a constant echo - anything in between would be due to a non-standard model of hearing.

Re:Sound Cards

[stewbacca]

I love a flat, accurate sound as well, but I give my desktop Bose Speaker/woofer combo thingy (the more expensive one) high marks. Not for music quality, mind you, just in the fact that it produces a big fat sound from my computer, which is playing sounds OTHER than music most of the time, and constantly competing against the noise of my kids playing drums or practicing trumpet or playing Xbox, or whatever.

Nothing grates my ears more than "loudness button" settings that I know Bose gets ripped for a lot, but on their computer/usb system, they don't have that like their home systems do (I have a 15 year old Lifestyle system as reference). The real shame in Bose home stereo is that they charge premium prices for inferior gear. My main system is now Paradigm Monitor 9s and a Klipsch subwoofer, which together cost about the same as four little cardboard cube speakers and a muddy woofer from Bose.

Re:Sound Cards

[supermegadope]

After 10 years of recording on my PC I just last week built a new box with my first decent soundcard. I went the M-Audio route also and got the Audiophile 192 and ended up only paying about $110 shipped brand new after hunting around a little. I dont think I could have gotten a good creative card for that price. While I am still having some issues during my learning curve( I cant get winamp to play thru this card for some reason), my virtual synths now have almost no delay, unlike my old philips card. --SMD

Re:Sound Cards

[Kamokazi]

You're right there, and if that moron is actually using Bose speakers he probably can't hear the difference either over all the marketing BS he listens to.

However, the biggest noticable improvment the average gamer can see is not necessarily in audio quality, but in game performance. By pushing audio processing off to the card, the CPU is less stressed and game performance can increase. This is not always immediately apparent, because idle framerates rarely increase much...it's during the action sequences with lots of different audio effects going on that an independent sound card can really make a difference. It smooths the framerate out. If you look at TFA under gaming performance, you will see what I mean...overall there is a pretty minimal framerate increase, but when you look at sudden dips in performance on the Realtek, you'll notice they are less severe on the higher-end Asus and x-Fi. (I don't like their choice of Vista on this, as it COMPLETELY changed the audio handling and drivers are still being refined for OpenAL. You'd see more of a difference on XP.)

Re:Sound Cards

[GravityStar]

The same happened to me. I purchased my X-Fi just for Bioshock.

Environmental surround sound through my regular headphones was my must-have feature. This is provided by the X-Fi through EAX 5 and CMSS-3D. Sadly, I will not be leaving Creative as a customer, until another brand of soundcard can give me a identical or superior experience.

Re:Sound Cards

[Hal_Porter]

At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".

All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.

Re:Sound Cards

[Hal_Porter]

What do you mean by "such a hack"? In windows the application sends samples to the audio driver. With a USB sound card the audio driver can just allocate the correct amount of USB bandwidth for audio and then stream the samples out to the soundcard. That can just convert digital to analogue. It seems like a great idea to me, especially as the D to A converter in an external soundcard is very easy to shield from noise. And they work on laptops too. And CD quality audio is not too bandwidth intensive - only 44.1*(16bit/8)*2 channels=176K/sec. Given USB 2.0 bus bandwidth is ~60MB/sec that's not much. Even 5.1 at a hugher sample rate and bit depth should be streamable without problems because of the way ISO transfers work with pre allocated bandwidth. Once Wireless USB takes off you could even stream audio from your laptop to your hifi.

Ok this assumes that the soundcard supports the format the application asked for, otherwise someone does sample rate conversion, but that's no biggies. You can spend a lot of money and get a card that supports every rate under the sun or spend a little and get one that supports a few and relies on rate conversion.

I think it's a great idea. There's even an USB audio device class so you don't need to use a driver written by the vendor, juse use the one bundled with the OS. You can make microphones and telephones too and plug them in and they will work.

Re:Sound Cards

[MrMacman2u]

For 300% more $$$ than any other manufacturer....

Re:Sound Cards

[JCSoRocks]

Just posting to remove my moderation. I fat-fingered it and chose overrated instead of funny... not quite the same thing!

Re:Sound Cards

[alan_dershowitz]

And the latency is crap, leading to dropped frames if you are doing analog video capture.

Re:Sound Cards

[Pojut]

My dad has a pair of old Bose 901 Series II walnut-cabinet speakers, circa 1974. Even today, those things sound amazing.

I know that for a while Bose has been the quiet laughingstock of the audio world, but their older stuff sounds fantastic even by today's standard.

Re:Sound Cards

[marsu_k]

inability of humans to distinguish between a sine wave and a saw wave at almost all frequencies Huh? Triangle waves and sine waves certainly sound similar, although in my opinion they can be distinguished - but if you seriously can't hear the difference between a sine wave and a saw wave your hearing is completely impaired.

Re:Sound Cards

[schnikies79]

Get back to me when I can get a CHEAP sound card (sub $40) that has front panel headers.

Re:Sound Cards

[johnwbyrd]

I disagree. Sound dropouts are caused by having insufficient buffer sizes, insufficient CPU time to do mixing and processing, or a combination of the two. While DirectSound supports on-board mixing and secondary buffers on sound cards, game programmers can't rely on their existence... and so very few modern games correctly support on-board mixing. What's more, Vista actively disables support for on-board sound mixing, so your fancy sound card definitely won't buy you anything on that platform.

The amount of memory and CPU required to process modern game sound is trivial (say 3 or 4 megabytes, plus maybe 1 or 2% of any modern CPU) compared to all the other stuff that a game must do. In practice, skippage is much more commonly related to buggy lying drivers than on- or off-board audio.

There's a huge quantity of hype surrounding PC audio cards, and there always will be. The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between on-board audio and an expensive sound card... especially when connected to the dreadful PC speakers that seem to be the standard nowadays, which are by far the weakest part in the typical signal chain.

3-D would be a great area to improve the PC in; unfortunately there's no gold standard for what 3-D sound should be. In fact there are a bunch of competing almost standards: PL2, EAX, DSound's HRTF, DTS, etc., etc.

So no, marketing buzz to the contrary, gaming is not necessarily enhanced by the use of a better sound card. And yes, I am a professional game audio programmer (IAAPGAP).

Re:Sound Cards

[gid]

Exactly, I use an old pair of Sony tower speakers with a t-amp direct to my on board audio. I always try to use the onboard audio first, if it sucks, then I'll buy a sound card. But I always listen first and see how it sounds. I've built computers for other people that came with the most muddled sound cards I've heard, and I'd pop in a cheap YMF724/YMF744 card and it sounds fantastic. I used to always need to put a sound card in, but I haven't had to in the last two computers I've built for myself. At least now I know what to buy if I ever need one.

My last creative card was an SB Pro, work great in it's time. I probably still have it in a box somewhere. :)

I recently bought a Sennheiser gaming headset, which I'm quite fond of. These cans pick up every little subtle footstep games produce, nothing beats em for $60 or so.

Re:Sound Cards

[Mdentari]

Well people know that a great sound card is overkill on cheap speakers or even a moderately priced speaker system. I do audio engineering and rely on high end equipment for my pro work and find that on board motherboard sound has improved much in the last 5 years and is good enough for many users. Ask a user what's more important, a new video card or a new sound card and they will choose video 9 out of 10 for gaming.

Re:Sound Cards

[geminidomino]

Have to disagree with you on that one... At least the on-board sound in my Linux desktop (Think it's an NForce).

I don't know if it's the drivers, but it's awful. Buzzing and distortion was horrid. I had to buy an Audigy 4 to put in there (this was before the latest set of Creative debacles).

Definitely on the lookout for a replacement company. Does this card work in Linux?

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Macs for ages.

My G5's audio wasn't stellar by any means...
When I recently used the on-board audio my new PC, it sounded terrible in comparison.

I could give a rats ass about surround sound or EAX.
I just want a 44khz 16-bit stereo sound card that has decent quality output.
How many people do you know with surround sound hooked up to their PC?

Its not a big deal for me though, as I usually use a USB headset.

Re:Sound Cards

[sr. bigotes]

All right, that's going too far. Creative is obviously a terrible company with infuriating anti-consumer practices, but it is not true that their add-in cards are worse than onboard RealTek chipsets. That is demonstrably not true, per TFA. The actual problem with Creative cards for all these years is that they had a monopoly on features because of EAX. Gamers who also like to record had no other choices (and still don't, until Asus or someone else offers something like the X-Fi platinum). Monopolies breed bad practices, but the hardware itself is high quality. The software leaves much to be desired, but there is a healthy modding community to make up for it(check out driverheaven.net for examples of this).

Re:Sound Cards

[AK Marc]

No offense to you, but it's down to preference at that point.

If only that was the issue. "I would prefer a dedicated sound card" is one argument. However, "A dedicated sound card is better" is what is usually said. For most internal cards, 99% of all users will notice no difference. The crappiest built-on cards on name brand boards are sufficient such that they are classified in the "most internal cards" in the previous sentence. So, if one is concerned about sound quality and using it for gaming or youtube with speakers plugged into the computer (no external DAC or such), an add-in card will do nothing to improve their experience. If having a dedicated card makes them feel better, then that's a legitimate reason, but they shouldn't lie to themselves and confuse others with "dedicated cards are better."

Re:Sound Cards

[ncc74656]

The cool thing about Dolby Digital Live encoding is the game doesn't have to support Dolby Digital. The sound card and drivers magically remix positional DirectSound events into a Dolby Digital bitstream.

In other words, I plug my computer into my AV receiver with 1 audio cable and surround sound Just Works in all my games.

Does anyone know if this card works with Linux? I'm thinking one of these would allow me to transcode multichannel audio to something more space-efficient (like AAC) and then have my MythTV box convert it back to AC3 on-the-fly before sending it to the receiver. Multi-channel audio over 1 cable FTW...if it'll work.

Re:Sound Cards

[Mikkeles]

'that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".'

You're writing this like it's a bad thing!

Re:Sound Cards

[niceone]

Because for really good audio sound cards inside a computer case are not a good idea

I think this is a bit of a myth put about by the external card makers. There are many pro-level internal sound cards - for instance this one is very highly respected. (And it should be good for over $1000 for only 4 analog io's!)

Re:Sound Cards

[c_forq]

Well, for one thing a triangle wave is not a saw wave (Wikipedia has decent articles on both, under Sawtooth wave and Triangle wave), but regardless I actually misspoke, I meant square wave. A sine wave and a square wave are indistinguishable to human perception at frequencies above 7,000 Hz. That is over half of the audible wave spectrum of humans.

Re:Sound Cards

[floodo1]

you might want to consider that creative, in the pro market, IS e-mu. And you'd be hard pressed to argue that anything M-Audio is better than e-mu's cards.

especially considering patchmix vs m-audios mixer

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why people spend time typing up a comment, only to be incapable of telling the difference between "beech" (a type of tree) and "beach" (as sandy place), and which one belongs in the name of their expensive sound card.

Re:Sound Cards

[floodo1]

Sorry dood. LOTS of people CAN hear a REAL difference between typical consumer gear and high end audio.

Sure a lot of high end stuff (esp super high end) is hard to distinguish, but high end vs consumer IS an audible difference for a not-insignificant percentage of the population.

Especially when it comes to imaging. This is something that can be easily demonstratd with some high quality recording. Particularly Focal demo cd's. There are songs that have things, for example, liek the lead singer slight off center, and have the cymbals imaged higher (physically). On consumer gear this will sound like the singer is in the center and at the same height as the symbals. Play the same track back on a better setup (same environment) and you will hear what the recording actually contains.

well maybe you won't, but I will, and so will many of my friends.

a lot of the benefit of high end audio comes from training yourself to recognize such subtleties. Its akin to a jeweler and a consumer. The consumer buys a poor quality stone and is happy, but the jeweler comes along, and through his training, is able to recognize the defects.

Maybe those defects dont matter to you, and thats fine, but for me it does matter :)

Re:Sound Cards

[Govannon]

You are right on the money here. Most quality recordings have been processed by a skilled mastering engineer, with a acoustic treated room built for exactly reproducing the sound of the recorded mix. These engineers spend many hours with the most expensive and best sound processors available.

When the track is finished some kid with a X-fi card is going to "enhance" the sound with his $90 card? I don't think so.

I have an RME multiface audiointerface and studio monitors to reproduce the sound exactly like the mastering engineer wants it to sound, not the sound processed through some cheap ass DSP system made to be as cheap as possible for mass production.

Re:Sound Cards

[Mdentari]

Yes! Vegas is a genius album by the Crystal Method. The low end on the first track gave me one of the best audio experiences I've ever had at my studio. It was the first time I heard the low end on a set of speakers that sounded right. I paid over a thousand for my speakers alone, not counting converters and cabling, etc but it took the extreme stress of paying so much for equipment well well worth it.

Re:Sound Cards

[HeavyD8086]

You lost all credibility when you mentioned you are using Bose speakers.

Re:Sound Cards

[HeavyD8086]

. . . and I replied to the wrong parent?

Re:Sound Cards

[adolf]

Indeed. Most monitors also have similar adjustments.

What I'm talking about by saying BlurryVision is, say, a 1280x1024 LCD monitor running at 800x600 -- none of the pixels line up, and the aspect ratio is slightly wrong. Folks do this either out of ignorance or on purpose (to make things appear larger on-screen), but never with the goal of having a correct display - it's all about making things as big (or as easy) as possible. Turning off scaling would make the pixels line up, but it would look even worse to those people who are frequently affected by BlurryVision.

Just like FatPersonVision, where (for example) a normal-aspect picture gets stretched to fill a wide-aspect display: People have either done it out of ignorance or on purpose, but having their newfangled 16x9 monitor or television have black bars along each side -- even if it is the most-correct way to display the content -- seems deemed largely unacceptable by the masses. They seem far more tolerant of watching FatPersonVision than of having any portion of their "investment" gone to waste, and so disabling scaling doesn't work in that application either.

Like sound cards with lousy inputs, and mountains of important data with no backup, people don't care that it's wrong or that it could easily be improved.

Re:Sound Cards

[dokebi]

As soon as you said "Bose", you lost all respect among us audio folk.

Re:Sound Cards

[dubbreak]

And you'd be hard pressed to argue that anything M-Audio is better than e-mu's cards.
At the same price point?

If you are getting above the cost of m-audio there are lots of options. I haven't used e-mu so I can't speak of them. Personally if I was going to spend big bucks I'd be going for MOTU (Mark of the unicorn) as I have had very good experience with their firewire products.

Re:Sound Cards

[ichigo 2.0]

Ah, you were lamenting on the ignorance of the average user. I misunderstood and thought you were annoyed by the fact that most monitors automatically scale the image with no setting to disable the feature. :)

Re:Sound Cards

[SanityInAnarchy]

Here, let me rephrase it:

In short, why would you, as a developer, use MP3 when you have total control over the software on which the music (or other sound) will be played back?

I'd have thought that "total control over the software" bit would have given it away...

The question is, why would game developers pay patent royalties for MP3 when there are better codecs available, for free? Because apparently, they do pay those royalties.

Re:Sound Cards

[orasio]

FatPersonVision (finely scaled) looks much better to me than black bars. Black bars are distracting, and make the display small, even if it's not my "investment" (I don't even own a 16:9 tv).
You probably know that our eyes and brain know how to adjust for that. And you get a bigger image.
For instance, the TV screen seldom does look 3:4 from our point of view. Our brain knows how to adjust for perspective, and ratio is an easy transform, works perfect.
Of course, if you look at FPV with reluctance, you will always hate it. If you try a bit, you might like it.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

If you go digital and have a receiver does it really matter? Except some CPU usage. Isn't it general knowledge that you don't get what you pay for with Bose? Maybe it's different with cheaper computer speaker packages.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

1 simple solution: Use stereo headphones and virtual surround.

Most people can't hear a difference of say a 160/192 kbps VBR lame encoded mp3 and the CD source so does it really matter that it's mp3?

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

After looking at E-MUs webpage I can say that the OS X support for M-Audio cards are better than E-MUs (doesn't seem to be one for the 1616M laptop which I looked at so that was easy..)

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

Yeah, she should be happy he last long enough for there being a reason to turn it over.

or

Does anyone really have sex long enough for the record to end?

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

Uhm, because one download mp3s and don't buy music?

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

And the amp in and electronics in the audiocard in the usbcable are probably really kickass, or not.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

Running wrong resolution for desktop work only seem retarded, and the DPI of the LCDs are already so low so I can't understand why anyone would make it even worse, but I guess Windows aren't the best Os to scale up the interface in.

Regarding the later doesn't never games support wide screen? I don't play them so I don't know. I do play WC3 and I do play it on widescreen without black bars, but the small stretchout doesn't matter much in an FPS, aslong as you can click the correct unit you are fine. And I don't mind the blur (which isn't blur at all but simply wrong data on screen =P)

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

I don't think I ever used the onboard sound on my VIA KT400 (Gigabytecard) I had, used an SB Live back then so I can't talk about that, but the onboard sound of my VIA K8T800 (or something like that, Athlon64 mobo from MSI) was real crap and it sound like total shit when I had to use it in OS X (and also Solaris I belive) instead of my Audigy 2 platinum ex with kx-drivers.

Now I have a 2H 2007 MBP and the onboard sound on this one are quite crappy aswell, I still don't have a mini-TOS and my analoge cable are shit so I can't talk much about that (the later one sounds like pure shit compared to the digital transmitted sound I used to enjoy thought) but I don't think it sound very good with my Alessandro/Grado MS-1 + HD414 pads either. It's good enough for the very shitty builtin speakers thought (shitty compared to anything not builtin, decent for being a lapop I guess.)

So I'd say that _MY_ experience of onboard sound is that it really DO suck, and even if the quality would be decent it would put more load on your CPU. I'm sure it getting better and better for each generation thought, and some of the USB amps people use integrated with their headphones are probably worse. The only good I can see with it are that it seems to be easy to get AC97 drivers for most.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

The audigy resample everything to 48kHz internally, so the Live proabably does aswell (both got the same sound chip don't they?), and that seems shitty to me. Resample 44kHz at 48? Can't be good ...

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

Of course better virtual surround (better algoritms which affect the sound in a similair way as your ears would do) will make a diffrence, and also a headphone with a bigger soundstage such as the Audio-Technica ATH-A500 will probably make a difference aswell.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

But people who use dedicated PC speakers shouldn't be allowed to answer in this thread in the first place.

Re:Sound Cards

[aliquis]

What says his "desktop speaker pair" are worse than your 2.1 desktop speakers? May be similair stuff. And your $100 worth of desktop speakers probably don't sound very good at all, and if peoples home theater setups have been sounding even worse it's because they was packages in the $100-200 range for atleast 5 speakers and a subwoffer. Of course that will sound like shit awell, but it will be surround ... To buy a stereo system with atleast half-decent sound for the same amount of money never came to their mind ..

Re:Sound Cards

[Just Some Guy]

What says his "desktop speaker pair" are worse than your 2.1 desktop speakers? May be similair stuff. And your $100 worth of desktop speakers probably don't sound very good at all,

Google for Aura Aspect 20/40. Trust me: mine are better.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

a pain to setup

"set up" ("setup" is a noun).

Re:Sound Cards

[floodo1]

emus range is 100-400 or so.

Re:Sound Cards

[floodo1]

there is NO OSX or Linux support. Windows only :(

Re:Sound Cards

[DarkVader]

You've got a G5?

Use the optical ports. No, the internal amp isn't amazing. It's good enough. The optical ports will bypass it for you.

Re:Sound Cards

[billcopc]

I would like to see a shift away from fancy sound cards, moving all that post-processing into the software realm. That way, each person could have their own little sonic profile, with EQ settings and effect enhancements they could carry around on a USB stick or hosted on a web site. Sit at any computer, load up your profile and it will sound exactly how you like it.

Me, I do that in my car to some extent. When I'm riding alone, the EQ is flat, the effects are switched off and the sound is balanced and tight. When I've got the wife or friends in tow, I switch to a more club-like preset with heavy bass and sharp highs, with some light dynamics for that punchy party sound. Mind you, I've plunked a generous amount of cash, blood and sweat into my car stereo, most of it compensating for the horrible acoustic environment, but I'm not dragging a quarter-rack full of gear in my trunk, most of the magic happens in software on my head unit, which means the same thing could be done on a PC very cheaply.

That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drivers.

[PaulGaskin]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit, being subsidized to keep drivers out of the hands of free software developers?

Oh yeah

[arikol]

All Asus products I have used have been greatusually cheaper than the competion and beating them seriously on price, they seem to be on a roll (or on a bun)

Re:Oh yeah

[DCGaymer]

Sadly though ASUS has the SLOWEST website I've ever used for a tech company. Downloads and updates take hours even over broadband.

Re:Oh yeah

[Jesus_666]

ASUS is nice, although I had an above-average number of DOA products with them. However, nobody else appears to have that issue so it might be a freak coincidence.

Re:Oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had that... as well as problems getting them to RMA items. I've got 3 graphics cards sitting in my closet completely hosed because they keep 'losing' the RMA numbers. It's annoying. I've also had problem finding the right drivers on the web page... it's like they want you to give up.

Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it work in Linux? X-Fi on Linux is terrible at best and doesn't exist at normal. Can someone some insight as to whether it works in Linux or not?

Re:Linux

[Lisandro]

Does it work in Linux? X-Fi on Linux is terrible at best and doesn't exist at normal. Can someone some insight as to whether it works in Linux or not?

I was just checking it myself and seems like ALSA supports the card allright. I've been interested on a high quality, cheap soundcard because of my main gripe with onboard audio: noise levels. I can hear hiss through my nVidia onboard audio adapter (which otherwise sounds damn fine), and even faint pop and crackles when the HDD is doing heavy work.

I've hated creative's drivers for years

[Anonymous Coward]

The last creative sound card I bought was the audigy 2 platinum. After putting up with the drivers for a year I ditched it because it was really dragging down my system. I vowed at that point I'd never buy another creative product again. I'm glad to hear there's a sound card out there that can compete with them at a decent price.

Kudos to Asus

[KnowledgeEngine]

I don't know about everyone else here but I for one am happy to see someone bringing the competition to Creative's front door. I can remember resentments towards them from my ms-dos childhood. As a matter of fact I don't think I have any good memories of Creative driver experiences... Hmmmm. I wonder if the emulated EAX drivers can replicate the awesome sound effects like in this video though http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Re:Kudos to Asus

[mycroes]

OMG I fell for it again. Like the song though :o

Re:Kudos to Asus

[0xdeadbeef]

WTF? Two girls one cup? On YouTube? That ain't going to last long. I think what you meant to post was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

Re:Kudos to Asus

[KnowledgeEngine]

I find if I have my AGEIA PhysX and my Creative Sound Blaster Ultimate Wallet Drainer 3000 hooked up and dual SLI that Rick Astleys right arm swings a little more violently while he dances. That is exactly the kind of experience I paid over $1000 in add on equipment for. And man can you beat the "Concert Hall" DSP for that one? Just joking...I have none of the above.

Re:Kudos to Asus

[hlt32]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

There, fixed it for you.

but ...

[eneville]

does it run linux??

Moot with Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since EAX doesn't work in Vista anymore, does this really matter anymore?

Re:Moot with Vista?

[MojoStan]

Since EAX doesn't work in Vista anymore, does this really matter anymore? That depends on what is meant by "doesn't work." As your link (from January 2007) describes, Creative provides a Vista driver for their cards that "allows you to run your favourite DirectSound3D games on Windows Vista as the developers intended - with full hardware accelerated 3D audio and EAX support! This is done by translating DirectSound calls into OpenAL."

As TFA says, Asus's card does the same thing in Vista, but performs the EAX acceleration (including the latest version 5.0) using the CPU. Also, they performed an EAX 5.0 listening test in Vista (on page 6) and EAX seemed to "work" just fine. From TFA:

• After an afternoon of gaming, I came away quite impressed with DirectSound 3D GX. Creative may be correct in saying that it doesn't deliver a genuine EAX 5.0 experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if its emulation isn't an exact 1:1 replica of EAX effects. But that didn't diminish my gaming experience in the least. Bioshock is packed with aural ambiance, and the underwater city of Rapture was every bit as creepy with the Xonar as it was with the X-Fi. I couldn't detect any difference between the cards in Battlefield 2, either, even in intense firefights loaded with explosions, gunfire, and frantic cries for a medic.

sweet!

[FudRucker]

i will buy one as soon as i see it in the alsa-driver source package...

Any info on ALSA support?

[Daniel Phillips]

Can anybody clue me in on the state of ALSA support for this card?

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[compro01]

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[morgan_greywolf]

There is a beta driver for the D2X. Since, according to TFA:

The DX employs what's marked as an Asus AV100 audio processor while the D2X uses an AV200. Don't pay too much attention to the names silk-screened onto the chips, though; they're the very same C-Media Oxygen HD audio processor under the hood. Asus says the chips go through a "quality sorting" process to separate the AV100s from the AV200s.

So, since the chipsets are the same, I would guess that the D2X driver might work for the DX, perhaps with little or no modifications.

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[feld]

In progress

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus

Last I heard the higher end Xonar cards are nearly feature complete. I'd expect this to be working fine in the coming months.

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[Daniel Phillips]

There is a beta driver for the D2X. Since, according to TFA:

The DX employs what's marked as an Asus AV100 audio processor while the D2X uses an AV200. Don't pay too much attention to the names silk-screened onto the chips, though; they're the very same C-Media Oxygen HD audio processor under the hood. Asus says the chips go through a "quality sorting" process to separate the AV100s from the AV200s.

So, since the chipsets are the same, I would guess that the D2X driver might work for the DX, perhaps with little or no modifications. Thanks, that's enough for me to go do the buy and try thing.

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[Azarael]

http://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus The alsa wiki suggests that the DX is not supported yet, but the D and D2X are (and appear to use a newer chipset to boost).

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[Anonymous Coward]

... complete now:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus
http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[Cervisia]

The chipset name doesn't have any meaning; the AV100 and AV200 are just relabeled CMI8788 chips.

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the DX is supported. If you RTFA, there is no difference between the AV100/AV200. They are both using the CMI8788 audio processor. (C-Media Oxygen HD). Heres some info on the snd-oxygen driver, and the author's status page.

http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-oxygen

http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/User:ClemensLadisch#CMI8788_driver_status

Re:Any info on ALSA support?

[morgan_greywolf]

Well, no problem. But I do emphasize the word 'guess'. Mind you I have years of hard-fought experience with using, patching, compiling, installing and even sometimes hand-hacking Linux drivers -- particularly audio, video and NIC drivers -- but even so, since I don't have a card to play with, my statement is nothing more than a best guess based on my own interpretation of the facts at hand. :) So caveat emptor.

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit Yes, esp. considering Microsoft has no tits and if it did, they'd be nasty man-boob type tits that nobody wants to see or even acknowledge their existence.

Competition

[ohxten]

Good competition is wonderful.

Re:Competition

[MooseMuffin]

Seriously. I'm tired of sound cards basically being an all Creative market. While this newspost is basically a slashadvertisement, I'll buy it as soon as I dig up another review or two that echo the results of this one.

Re:Competition

[ThePhilips]

And here I thought that sound card market gradually died, being consumed and obliterated by on-board, embedded in chipset audio adapters.

For 90% of uses the adapters are "good enough." For everything else I have an iPod.

Re:Competition

[Roger_Wilco]

Uh, Creative makes lots of low-end sound cards, but if you want a good one, there are a number of companies, such as M-audio.

tell the difference?

[timmarhy]

personally i think most of the audio improvments have been a load of wank.

i haven't been able to tell the difference between my old live and my brandnew supposed "HD" soundcard. maybe on some seriously expensive speakers and a full THX system i could, but who needs to spend $300 on one of these cards creative put out?

Re:tell the difference?

[TheMeuge]

"who needs to spend $300 on one of these cards creative put out?" Hopefully nobody. One may, however, need to spend money of a good sound card, in order to output to a decent audio system. For me, the absolutely deal-breaker is Creative's insistence of resampling all 44.1kHz content to 48kHz. I don't rely on my sound card to do any of the work - I just want it to take the data, and faithfully stream it via SPDIF into my external DAC. That's why for many years now, I've been enjoying the services of the M-Audio Revolution.

Re:tell the difference?

[compro01]

barring HRS-type features and EAX, soundcards are generally soundcards. most any discrete soundcard sounds better than an onboard sound simply by virtue of getting it away from the electrical cacophony on the motherboard surface.

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want good audio quality, you are much better off looking into semi-pro music production cards.

M-Audio, Terratec, ESI, Ego Sys. (Not EMU though. ;)

Aside from better A/D and D/A and so forth, Creative's cards tend to screw with the dynamics and frequency responses. Don't ask me why.

Get a used M-Audio AP 2496, a standard starter card for home studio musicians, and you will be amazed at the difference.

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's why for many years now, I've been enjoying the services of the M-Audio Revolution.

Ditto. Excellent quality. Creative sucks.

Re:tell the difference?

[ilikejam]

Maybe one of you fine slashdotters will know...

Are there any USB cards out there that work with Linux, that don't resample 44.1K up to 48K, and have SPDIF I/O ? I have been seeking this holy grail for many years now.

Re:tell the difference?

[ThePhilips]

The sound card parameters are floating far above human capability to hear.

At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need hi-fi components starting from $600, loudspeakers starting at $400 for piece and cables for $300. And even then you (as most others) probably wouldn't be able to tell difference.

But there are some people (especially musicians) who can tell the difference, appreciate the better quality and actually willing to pay for it. (And note that price is generally high not because they are expensive, but because sale volumes and demand are relatively low.)

For most uses of PC, signal to noise ratio of 80db is more than enough. The problem is of course few cards though boast even higher values, rarely do deliver: PC is crammed with many components which indirectly influence and degrade sound quality. For one, normal chinese power supplies are of terrible quality - and hardly suitable for use with such cards. Add here voltage variance induced by hard drive (re)spinning/seeking and video card draining amps to draw some accelerated 2/3D - and you got all what is required for poor audio quality.

Re:tell the difference?

[jmorris42]

Not exactly. I have a Creative USB sound device hooked up to my Myth box I picked up several yeara ago. It has a switch on the side to disable the analog outputs. If the analog plugs are enabled everything gets the 48Hkz resample. Kill the analog outputs and it will send a proper optical output to my amp at either 44.1 or 48. Haven't tried 32k or 96k, the amp supports em but I didn't have anything handy to test with. Turned out not to really matter in my case since the PVR-350 only captures audio at 48k.

Re:tell the difference?

[Solandri]

I once plugged my studio monitors (aka really nice headphones) into my computer while gaming. You can tell the difference between good and bad audio if you have good speakers or monitors. Unfortunately, the audio became so clear that it was obvious the sound was synthesized or using looped samples. It actually detracted from my enjoyment of the game, so I went back to the $20 no-name speakers.

It's kinda like how the switch from CRTs to LCDs made text razor-sharp, but it exaggerated the "jaggies" in graphics to the point that anti-aliasing became a mainstream feature in video cards.

Re:tell the difference?

[immcintosh]

At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need hi-fi components starting from $600, loudspeakers starting at $400 for piece and cables for $300. And even then you (as most others) probably wouldn't be able to tell difference.

There is no reason you should ever spend this much on cables. Ever. In fact, go ahead and do a blind test between Monster Cable and a coat hanger, and I defy you to be able to tell which is which. It's even extra-funny when people spend these kind of prices for digital cabling.

Re:tell the difference?

[maxume]

Damn it, I wanted to crack wise about digital cables.

I was going to go for something like "If a good cable costs $300, how much does a good DIGITAL cable cost?".

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Canopus DA-Port 2000 that is exactly what you describe (2xSPDIF in AND 2xSPDIF out USB device). Haven't used it in years, but it was pretty sweet. Anything in the DA-Port line would probably do exactly what you want, and they have excellent Linux support, if I remember correctly.
I'm not sure they were ever released outside of Japan, though.

Re:tell the difference?

[turing_m]

Don't forget the $480 wooden knobs, for that rich, warm sound.

Re:tell the difference?

[adamruck]

I understand your logic, however I question the reality that a musician would be able to tell any difference. I honestly think its more of a placebo affect. Until I see a scientific study (not from a vendor that selling the crap), I will fail to be convinced of any value.

Now things like lots of channels, or offloading work to the sound card, those things I wont argue against.

Re:tell the difference?

[ameoba]

Creative cards are primarily targeted at gamers. Gamers don't care much for SNR, what they care about is hardware accelerated sound taking load off the CPU. Most non-Creative cards up until now have been limited to EAX 2.0 which only gives you 32 channels of sound. Modern Creative cards are up to 128-channels with effects & higher quality audio. What makes this card interesting is that it has EAX 5.0 compatability.

Re:tell the difference?

[DimmO]

I've just ordered an M-Audio Transit (mainly for my fista laptop with uber shite noisy headphone jacks). http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit-main.html
From what I can tell, the drivers upload a firmware to it everytime you plug it in (or power-on your pc). This here will do the job in linux, apparently. http://sourceforge.net/projects/usb-midi-fw/

Re:tell the difference?

[billcopc]

If it weren't for M-Audio's spotty driver support, I'd praise them too. I've been quite happy with all their gear, they're quite affordable and they seem to know where to focus their attention... sometimes so-so build quality but excellent sound.

Re:tell the difference?

[DigitAl56K]

You're on the right track with SNR, but still a little off I feel.

I agree that at 120db SNR you do need very good equiptment to hear the difference, but the jump from the Audigy 2 to the X-Fi Elite Pro was certainly noticeable. Hi-fi equiptment is not necessary, a pair of headphones in the $150+ range will suffice so long as you don't need surround sound.

80db, though, is a terrible SNR and very obvious even on rather low-end headphones. I will grant you though that for users who prefer desktop speakers, especially in the $100 range, that you'd be hard pressed to notice since these tend to have much deeper flaws than poor SNR, often frequency response is entirely unbalanced and the ability of the speakers to deal with high power signals very poor.

Re:tell the difference?

[interiot]

Mmmm, knobs. Mind you, that $480 doesn't go towards any ultra-high-tolerance electronics either. Nope, $480 just for pure wholesome knobby wood.

Re:tell the difference?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well, actually with digital cables you do need to get a proper one, if you are doing a sufficient length. Now I say proper, not good, because what matters is impedance. Digital audio is pretty high frequency (as much as 25MHz for 192kHz stuff) and as such the cable acts like a wave guide as it does for video. Well, like with video it is a 75-ohm coax cable that you need. So while you don't need anything pricey, you do need to make sure you don't just use any old cable for digital audio.

Re:tell the difference?

[Rinikusu]

While $300 is quite excessive, I've gotten *great* usage of $60 Monster instrument cables. I play drunk punk-rock and roll. My gigs are beer filled, abusive, and cables get crushed, pulled, ripped, etc. Monster has a "no-questions asked" replacement policy and you can find them damn near anywhere. I've replaced 4 cables for free in less than a year, which isn't so bad because I generally go in to pick up strings and picks anyway. That's less than $20 a cable, so I'm already ahead. Soundwise, I can't tell the difference, but that's not why I bought it. :)

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

google "monster cable vs. coathanger"

Re:tell the difference?

[Breakfast Pants]

I've got an M-Audio Delta 1010lt; it works perfect on linux and kicks ass for everything.

Re:tell the difference?

[aaron.axvig]

I'm beginning to think the same way. After buying $5 cables from monoprice.com I've had several of them die (wire inside breaks near the plugs I think) in the last year or two. I am very careful to never stress them near the plugs but this still happens. So perhaps there is some value to expensive cables. But surely not for signal quality.

Re:tell the difference?

[tuxicle]

At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need hi-fi components starting from $600, loudspeakers starting at $400 for piece and cables for $300.

That or a $100 pair of Shure earphones. I could tell the difference between onboard audio from a Chaintech motherboard (whose buzzing frequency changed with CPU load, and loud clicks with any hard disk activity) and a SB Live 5.1 (pulled out of an old box). The Live is quiet, even with the volume turned up all the way.

Re:tell the difference?

[Daemonax]

Even James Randi is now adding such things to the the list of acceptable claims for the $1 Million prize. If someone in a blind test can tell the difference between high quality audio gear, they'll win.... What's the bet that no-one will ever get it.

Re:tell the difference?

[adolf]

The aforementioned Creative USB kit may fit your needs, depending on what ALSA does with it. The poster mentioned that the switch prevents the driver from resampling; however, the switch itself is just a USB Human Interface Device. It's up to the software to decide what needs done based on its position. The box itself a dumb device without any sort of internal DSP; internal resampling is quite far beyond its means.

I wish I could help more, but I don't have any gear which can report the output sampling rate of my own Soundblaster MP3+ (which apparently ended production a couple of years ago, though Ebay is sure to have some). It does at least produce good audio with ALSA in a plug-and-play fashion, where it presents itself as a bog-standard USB audio device.

The next step for you is probably to check the ALSA documentation or source to see if it ever supports sending 44.1KHz audio to USB devices without resampling at all. You'll either find a method that works, or discover that your holy grail does not exist within a reasonable budget.

Good luck.

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

THX certified speakers start at around $100. Logitech has some good 2.1 THX speakers that are currently sitting on my desk.

Re:tell the difference?

[John Betonschaar]

There is no reason you should ever spend this much on cables. Ever. In fact, go ahead and do a blind test between Monster Cable and a coat hanger, and I defy you to be able to tell which is which. It's even extra-funny when people spend these kind of prices for digital cabling. So true. I had this discussion with one of my friends who still seems to think anything more expensive is better, tried to explain to him that a $100 HDMI cable is in no way better than a $20 one, as the connection is digital and as such should either pass a 100% lossless signal or not work at all. It didn't help, he still thinks he should always go for the most expensive solution anyway. He's now looking at a 900 (analog, stereo!) amplifier together with 1 550 subwoofer and 2 250 speakers. I have no idea what on earth he is going to hook it up to but he just doesn't seem to understand that this kind of equipment only makes sense for true audiophiles (which he isn't), and I think they would *still* prefer a decent headphone.

Re:tell the difference?

[John Betonschaar]

Now where did all the euro-symbols go??

Re:tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely, it makes no sense not to use cheap house wiring mains cable as speaker wire, a low loss cable at a wallet friendly price

Re:tell the difference?

[4D6963]

At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need

Superman's ears (besides the fact that I'd be quite surprised if any sound system could actually deliver that). Considered that hardly anyone is supposed to hear any sounds under 0 dB, and that I wouldn't recommend you to play anything as loud as 100 dB, you don't actually need anywhere near a 120 dB SNR, never mind the fact that a CD has a ~96 dB range (which also means a 96 dB SNR).

Re:tell the difference?

[SirMeliot]

Don't forget you need to twiddle your wooden knob for a week to break it in first.

Otherwise it just sounds rubbish.

Re:tell the difference?

[bitrot42]

> It's even extra-funny when people spend these kind of prices for digital cabling.

While I agree that $300 cables are excessive, the "bits is bits" argument doesn't always hold true. WHEN you get those bits and getting ALL of them are both important, and cables can have a significant impact on this.

If a cable has poor high frequency response, the pulses are smoothed out and become less precise. Capacitance causes ringing that further distorts them. (Think: PC monitor ghosting from using a long cable of poor quality.) This makes the start of the pulses less precise, causing clock jitter. If it's really bad, you'll lose bits altogether.

In the early days of S/PDIF digital audio connections, the receiving device was clocked directly to the incoming signal. At that time, I had an outboard DAC that sounded *obviously* cleaner with a heavy RF grade cable than with the cheap line-level RCA variety. Other people commented without being asked or even told about the switch.

There is some speculation today that HDMI suffers from the same timing/jitter problems on uncompressed PCM soundtracks, but I am skeptical of this, given that adding clock recovery to a VLSI chip is trivial and essentially free at this point.

With this sort of thing in mind, if you've spent thousands on your gear, it's well worth spending a *reasonable* amount of money on high-quality digital interconnects. (This is much more about large conductors, heavy shielding and impedance matching than it is about gold-plated this and oxygen-free that, but this isn't the point.) If nothing else, it's worth it for peace of mind that you aren't missing something.

Re:tell the difference?

[gotw]

The digital cable scam is quite a wonderful thing. I nearly fell off my chair when i saw this wonderful offering from Denon.

That 1.5m 'denon-link' cable certainly looks familiar. Nice fabric coating, mind.....

Re:tell the difference?

[gotw]

Someone has just pointed me to this CD Demagnetizer.

I do hope this is a joke.

Re:tell the difference?

[nuzak]

The JREF is getting rid of the $1M challenge altogether, actually. Apparently it took up too much time and became a distraction from the other activities they wanted to pursue. Hopefully some more effective outreach is in the plans, but I don't see it happening. Frankly I've never been a big fan of Randi's rhetorical style and thus the dramas that surrounded the prize, but I suppose it was better publicity than no publicity.

Re:tell the difference?

[KZigurs]

As for the price, yes, I agree. Hovever you still have to select apropriate cabling for the job. No 5m cables for low-level unbalanced signals, no gauge 24 wire connecting your marantz (hi-current) amp to your $800 pair speakers... No unshelded wire to connect between components where another (no common ground) is present. If you are in a position where you can disqualify source* not cabling, you are fine.

*Sources. core reason why on-board sound cards sound as horrible as they do is not because they are shaite and RFI killed. It is because they are designed to drive not line towards your amplifier but cheap headphones and when faced with a different impedance on the line just goes floating.

Re:tell the difference?

[ConceptJunkie]

I didn't think that was that much, because I assumed it was dollars, but euros now, that's some real money, not these George Washington pesos we have over here.

Re:tell the difference?

[ConceptJunkie]

0x12C dollars?

Re:tell the difference?

[maxume]

Sure. If I had a $1000 TV and a $1000 audio system, I wouldn't hesitate to spend $50 extra to feel better about the quality of the cable I was buying, but all of the 'magic' properties that get attributed to analog cables get even worse when they get tried out on cables for digital applications -- "higher ones", "lower zeros", "doesn't slow your bits down", and so on, when all you need to know is that the cable meets the specifications for whatever standard it claims to meet the specifications for("Never pay more than Monster prices" isn't really bad start, they care enough about the marketability of their name to make stuff that works and they also overcharge, so anything more expensive is even more full of bull).

Re:tell the difference?

[immcintosh]

As for my use of coat hangers, I was referring to this little test. Hardly scientific I know, and I would certainly never argue that a coat hanger makes any kind of optimal transfer medium, but it certainly goes to show how silly the cabling business really is.

Re:tell the difference?

[checkyoulater]

At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need hi-fi components starting from $600, loudspeakers starting at $400 for piece and cables for $300.

For $300, I can buy a whole spool of 14/2 romex and wire in speakers for the whole street. And even 14/2 is overkill. Most speaker wire is 18 or 16 gauge.

Re:tell the difference?

[Daemonax]

That's a shame. There goes a nice bit of entertainment. Though, there are still a lot of videos for me to watch. My recent favourite was the American woman who claimed she could make you urinate with the power of her mind.

Re:tell the difference?

[ilikejam]

Thank you indeed, slashdotters. Your suggestions lead me, in a roundabout way, to this:

http://www.roland.com/products/en/UA-1EX/

DIP switches on the back to select the sample rate. How cool is that?

Re:tell the difference?

[Watts Martin]

Minor nitpick: while I know Monster has excessive cable lines designed to take as much money from you as you're willing to part with, you can buy their standard analog interconnects for $20, and their standard speaker wire (unterminated) for about 60 cents a foot. You can still certainly beat those prices for comparable quality cabling, but this idea that they're the poster child brand for audiophiles gone wild is simply wrong.

And no offense, but anyone who brings up coat hanger wire is welcome to wire their own system with it. I'm pretty sure that in a blind test I'll be able to tell the difference: the one that's got a guy behind it going GODDAMMIT, BEND! STAY IN THAT JACK! NO, CHRIST, DON'T BLOW THE FUSE AGAIN! OH, F--K is the one that's wired with coat hangers.

At last.

[Wowsers]

At last a half decent card at a reasonable cost too.

Shame it has no SP/DIF in and the SP/DIF Out is shared with Line and Mic (I hate shared connectors they are a real pain as you can't have permanent connections at the rear). Looks better than my old Soundblaster AWE32 (which I remember only buying because DOS games wanted all things Soundblaster and the card had pretty good S/N ratio for it's day).

As for using it in Linux, ALSA support would be nice, and hope PulseAudio can use it too...

Re:At last.

[Azarael]

That is included in the D2X, which is around the same price as the X-FI's

M-Audio - blatant plug

[2TecTom]

since we seem to be slashvertising, I vote for M-Audio:

Audiophile, or
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Audiophile192-main.html

Gamer/Home Theatre
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Revolution71-main.html

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[VGPowerlord]

I don't do audio work, but everyone I know who does serious audio work on a PC seems to have an M-Audio Audiophile card of some sort.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Symbha]

This is precisely why I did go with the Asus card... You can have both... plus a nice ASIO driver. Instead of choosing.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[happydan]

bah... latency of 3ms and great for djing. http://presonus.com/products/Detail.aspx?ProductId=4

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[ArAgost]

M-Audio isn't the only maker of such hardware, but the quality is there and the price is absolutely ok, so "normal people" (i.e. who doesn't have a studio budget) will chose Audiophile (this includes me, obviously)

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Anonymous Coward]

it's like having a vagina and an anus.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[justdrew]

thanks you! I didn't know about m-audio, I've just found exactly what I was looking for! thanks for the slashvertising! ;)

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Provocateur]

There's a typo in your ASUS.

And please, FFS. let's stick to car analogies.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[billcopc]

At $300+, you can't fairly compare it to the entry-level M-Audio cards ($100 for an Audiophile 2496, $60 for the Revolution).

Firewire interfaces do have one thing going for them: isolation. Portability is great, but having those DAC/ADCs outside the PC case is excellent for noise levels.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[jnelson4765]

We use M-Audio Delta 44s at the radio station I work with, and they've been ultra-reliable. Every digital musician I know uses M-Audio Firewire interfaces and Macs.

Fantastic hardware - and they don't needlessly wank with it to make the gamer d00dz want to buy the EX-III Super Duper card and throw out the EX-II Super Ultra card...

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Anonymous Coward]

M-Audio make great cards. I have a Delta 44 and couldn't be more happy about it. I use it mainly in a Windows environment with Cakewalk Sonar and various VST plugins, but it works perfectly under Linux too (chipset: Envy24).

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Anonymous Coward]

Previously I would of agreed with you, the Revolution 7.1 is fabulous. However M-Audio decided not to develop Vista drivers for it, even though it was released not long ago. Creative and M-Audio are both sinners when it comes to UAA/Vista.

Re:M-Audio - blatant plug

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers running Vista!

Wow, is that possible?

Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for free?

[Kenrod]

It must be press release Tuesday at Slashdot.

Yes, it will replicate the rickroll.

[sethstorm]

You can't make the voice sound any better.

Re:Yes, it will replicate the rickroll.

[BlueCollarCamel]

Because it's already the best.

PCI-E only

[nuzak]

It's a PCI device that requires a bridge chip to work on PCI Express ... but there's no PCI version to be found, unlike its more expensive D2X cousin (which lacks front-panel connectors). Bah. One of the reasons for me to buy a nicer soundcard is to take the load off my aging CPU.

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[hercubus]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit, being subsidized to keep drivers out of the hands of free software developers?

Ballmer's boobs...

Ballmer's boobs...

jiggling as he does a dance, a raving monkey dance. sweaty and jiggly, hairy and flabby...

need.mind.enema

need.thehun.now.net

glassed babe from Boris, pose for me? smile for me? oh god, i still see his boobs

creative cards are dookie

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative sound cards, even the highbrow models, have always been junk. Ask any audio enthusiast. Poor 44.1 -> 48kHz resampling was forgivable in the 90s, but not anymore. They'll do for casual music/game/internet usage, but if you want to record anything or do some serious listening, there are better cards out there for less than what Creative is pushing, which is pretty much just a fancy box and a well-known name.

Beware those who try to compete with Creative..

[Anonymous Coward]

If Asus's new product really does live up to the hype that's wonderful. I'd love to have an alternative. The problems with creative's products going all the way back to the original PCI live are well known and don't need to be covered.

Unfortunately, if this actually turns out to be a competitive product, Asus (Or more likely whoever makes the chip) will soon be the target of a lawsuit from Creative (Weather there is any merit or not). This is Creative's favorite way of dealing with their competitors.

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[jflo]

I would suck the hell out of that MS Man Boob... aka the MSMBN - Microsoft Man-Boob Network -.... I mean seriously, how good would that milk be? Seriously.

$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best

[Cctoide]

Um... er... kinky?

So, which card to buy?

[coldmist]

So, the current list of half-decent cards to choose from is:

Creative X-Fi (PCI, $60+)
Auzentech Prelude (PCI, uses the X-Fi chip, but should be better, but $180+)
Asus Xonar DX (PCIExpress 1x, $90)
Asus Xonar D2X (PCI, $200)

The X-Fi cards are nice, but not worth the price. I'm looking for some Linux support. I'm looking to hook it up to a digital 5.1 set of speakers and a headset on the front-audio of my case. I play 1st-person shooter games, so good DirectX support is required.

I currently have an X-Fi, with a hobbled front-audio solution, but decent windows support (both games and OS). But, it just is cranky to do anything with front-audio. Drivers suck, etc.

Hmmm. What to do.

Re:So, which card to buy?

[enoz]

The Auzentech cards do not support "Dolby Dolby Live" or "DTS Interactive" under Linux. Source: Auzentech FAQ.

That means if you are using multichannel audio from a non-DVD source, such as a game, you will be stuck with using the ol' spaghetti mess of analogue cables.

AFAICT the Creative X-Fi doesn't do realtime digital encoding at all.

I can only hope that ASUS provides support by the way of linux drivers, but, considering their lacklustre driver support for all their other hardware I have purchased, I'm not going to hold my breath.

Re:So, which card to buy?

[otis wildflower]

Has the b-enspirer been discontinued?

Given that I could care less about DACs as I'll only be attaching via digital and passing DTS, I have to say that the b-enspirer is a pretty darned good deal...

(and yes, apparently there are downloadable drivers for Linux from the website...)

MIDI in?

[spion666]

So, where are the midi inputs?

I think I'll pass.

Re:MIDI in?

[Symbha]

It's on a riser card, attaches to a connector on the board.

Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Please don't mod me funny, I'm asking quite seriously. If it runs with open source drivers, does 7.1 and has hardware mixing so that I don't have to bother with dmix, I'm buying it tomorrow morning.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[dmsuperman]

Someone mod parent funny.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Psychotria]

What was the question?

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[EdIII]

I have no idea why you were modded funny to begin with, especially since you specifically asked not to be. It's absolutely hysterical that the guy who replied to your asking you to be modded up got modded down.

I guess I don't get the joke.

In any case a quick search on Asus shows only XP/Vista drivers and only rumors of 3rd party drivers elsewhere.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Come on people, this is not funny :)

Somebody mod me down NOW!!!

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

That doesn't matter. If you expect to see official Linux support on the vendor's site you might as well not buy any hardware. Most hardware that has (community-developed) free drivers is not officially supported by the vendor, so the vendor will not even mention Linux anywhere.

Let's hope this changes as the number of Linux users increases.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[mczak]

Well, the Xonar D2X should work, whereas the Xonar DX not yet it seems: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus Since the hardware is so similar I guess it shouldn't take too long but I don't really know...

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[justinlee37]

God, if only I had mod points, I would mod you "funny."

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[dasunt]

I'd like 7.1, but only if it was possible to divide it up into 3 seperate stereo channels -- one for the TV, one for my computer speakers, and one for my headphones.

I like to use different outputs for different purposes...

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Skapare]

I wish there was a ROTFLMAO mod.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a link that prevents you from receiving certain types of mods.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[bartmanus]

I've been researching this for my own Linux-based HTPC and the sound card can be very important for nice sound. The more expensive ones support transcoding even simple stereo into Dolby Digial Live multichannel sound and some even to its THX competitor. This signal can then be sent to an amp capable of decoding it.

Anyhoo, these Asus Xonar cards have an audio chip called Oxygen HD (see the linked review, just under the last title on the first page). This is just a fancy name for C-media's CMI8788. AFAICR ALSA support is still under development without official support while OSS supports the chip. Some manufacturers prefer the non mandatory OSS licensing of OSS.

Who's scratching their head right now? :)

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you asked for it :P

(All joking aside though, i heard pretty good things of Terratec Aureon 7.1 Cards)

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[bartmanus]

I've heard replying to oneself isn't good, but I have to say that ALSA support has gone forward quite a bit since I last looked.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[YoungHack]

I agree with Godji. I specifically searched the threads for 'Linux' because I have a high-quality sound processing project, and affordable quality hardware with Linux support would be a real boon for me.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta Linux driver: http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/User:ClemensLadisch

Other info: http://forums.techgage.com/showthread.php?t=3031

I'm still running a Creative Audigy 2 ZS with pretty good Linux and Windows support. Do the Creative X-Fi cards still lack Linux support? If so, one of the Asus cards may be the one to get for both Linux and Windows support.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Man Eating Duck]

This is pure gold.

Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards...

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

I'm currently working my head around making an ideal (Linux-based) PC for my various needs. I've found good components for most of these needs, save one. A decent sound card.

The story of my current PC and sound is a real horror story. An integrated RealTek ALC861VD that has never worked properly. For two Ubuntu releases, it didn't work at all. Even now, setting sound output to ALSA gives me no sound at all for some reason. Setting it to OSS gives me sound, but only one application at a time, nothing from Flash player, and with constant errors from TiMidity. I've been trying to work with this situation for months now.

I'm fairly determined to avoid this situation happening twice, but I've absolutely no idea what I should buy to guarantee Linux compatibility. Should it be integrated or not? What manufacturer? I don't have particularly trained ears. All I really want is simple 2 channel sound (possibly with a sub-woofer), from as many applications at a time as I want, at a reasonably low price. In other words, exactly what Windows XP could give me right fucking now. But the situation of sound on Linux seems so bad that no one can give me a straight answer!

Creative can be pretty good!

[kipman725]

Some of you saying onboard sound is aceptable clearly haven't had the pleasure of the likes of: ASUS A7V8X-X and Foxconn GMX boards which have terible terible sound that makes creatives driver problems look tame and come complete with crackles @ disk access and mouse movement. I currently have a crative 24bit sound blaster it sounds pretty good works with ASIO4ALL and linux and cost £4 inc P+P from ebay. I would rather have a pro audio card but they are far more expensive and only marginaly better quality.

A Problem With The Article, & Follow Up

[rsmith-mac]

The article's author has posted a short follow up piece after someone pointed out that some of the RightMark Audio Analyzer results don't make any sense. The X-Fi's frequency response is all over the place in the loopback (and only the loopback) tests, which causes most of the RMAA results to come in far lower than they should, or indeed where they did score when the card was initially reviewed a couple of years ago. The Xonar still does well regardless, but the RMAA results are effectively useless right now. I suspect the issue is that they used Vista; RMAA is a very peculiar program and has not been certified for use on Vista in all cases because of the UAA screwing with things.

Also, for the sake of being pedantic, the X-Fi they used isn't Creative's best (hence the submission title is wrong); the Xtreme Music was the low-end model and was discontinued last year, to be replaced by the Xtreme Gamer. The Elite Pro is still Creative's highest-end X-Fi.

Re:A Problem With The Article, & Follow Up

[enoz]

the Xtreme Music was the low-end model and was discontinued last year, to be replaced by the Xtreme Gamer. The Elite Pro is still Creative's highest-end X-Fi. At least NVidia (for example) adds some numbers into their naming scheme. All this "Elite" and "Fatal1ty" garbage that Creative uses confuses me to no end.

Re:A Problem With The Article, & Follow Up

[ThurstonMoore]

I also found a few problems with the article.

From the article:

Note that adding a discrete sound card doesn't increase overall system power consumption by all that much over integrated motherboard audio.

The difference in power usage between the onboard sound and the Asus card was 13.1W when idle, that seems like a fairly significant difference to me. Also I am no Creative fan but the article seemed written with a bias toward Asus.

Why bother

[hack slash]

Improved sound quality? What for? I've got tinnitus you insensitive clod.

still love my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

[bersl2]

Works 99.999% awesome with ALSA (then again, I haven't experienced the rare problem that the cs46xx driver had in a very long time, so maybe I should say 100%), has hardware mixing (though I am using PulseAudio now; perhaps in the future soundcard manufacturers would be so nice as to have per-mixer-input volumes in hardware---not that it really matters), and generally Just Works.

Of course, maybe if sound starts to recover from the crap Creative has done to it (maintaining OpenAL is the only halfway-decent thing they do now), I could always get a newer one.

hopefully a worthy competitor and I like Asus kit

[nozzo]

I got a top-end XFi package and it costs flippin loads but the crystalizer worked very well with MP3's through my Samsung home cinema box, and there was a noticible performance gain with FS2004 as the on-board sound driver (it's an Abit board) was fairly resource intensive and caused frame rate issues with the simulator. That all cleared up with the Xfi. Problems began when I changed my PC and had a dual boot Vista/Ubuntu setup. Anyone following the driver issues will know what I mean when I say I felt like putting the Xfi on the floor and stamping on it. So Asus have pulled out a decent sound card eh? Me very interested.

Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Marrow]

Why shouldn't all decoding be moved out to the speakers? Just send them binary data and let
the analog rendering be done as far from the noisy elements of the computer as possible.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Khyber]

So move them from the noisy components of a computer, and build it right on top of the noisy components of a power amplifier?

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[_xeno_]

Digital sound output already exists. I have a USB headset where the DAC is in a little bundle away from the USB plug.

Not to mention that my current motherboard on my desktop has SPDIF in and out on-board (which is what I'm using after getting fed up with Creative a good two years ago).

Of course, I don't actually use the digital plugs on my motherboard, because analog speakers cost like $20-$50 while a receiver capable of handling SPDIF is a bit more.

So if you want to go all-digital for your sound, you can do it today. Well, almost all-digital, since you still have the final DAC to interface with the human brain. :)

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[enoz]

Last time I checked, amplifiers didn't have 100 million transistors operating up to Gigahertz pumping out EMF.

Anyway I agree with the GP (is the Parent a troll?).

If you have a digital source you may as well keep the signal digital for as long as possible because as soon as you go through a DAC you will start introducing noice into the equation.

Digital Receivers (amps) take a digital input such as PCM or AC3, decode, and pump the output to speakers. And they sound great.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[rtechie]

"Pro" soundcards use breakout boxes (boxes outside of the PC) containing the ADAC for exactly this reason. This arraignment is more expensive, which is why these cards generally cost around $1000 USD.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[jhol13]

There are a few companies which do exactly that.

For example http://www.genelec.com/products/2-way-monitors/8130a/. Genelecs tend to be expensive, but there might be cheaper from other manufacturers (active speaker generally are expensive).

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Grey_14]

probably because it would require expensive speakers, and would effectively obsolete the use of headphones on computers, but many decent soundcards and even onboard sound nowadays are offering an optical output jack for just what you've suggested, I use it myself to output to my home theater.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, just move the decoding to some external USB unit. That has the benefit of actually working with all speakers and headphones, and is a fairly well tested and supported technology.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[walshy007]

I agree with the why have the analog signal coming out of the computer, to an extent, but some people still like vinyl, no point going analog -> digital -> analog when you don't need to.

Also, having the dac in the speakers would probably be the wrong place regardless, as quality speakers typically aren't self-driven, and need an amp to be hooked up to it, which will only amp the analog signal, so put the dac before the amp you say? good idea, only thats still a far stretch from having the speakers themselves do it, which was the original point.

In the end it's not worth the hassle, for most people, to have digital to analog conversion outside the pc.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Slashcrap]

Why shouldn't all decoding be moved out to the speakers? Just send them binary data and let the analog rendering be done as far from the noisy elements of the computer as possible. Why bother with decoding at all? Just send a digital signal to plain old analogue speakers.

Anyone who thinks I am joking should probably Google "Class D amplifier" before replying.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

100 percent agreed - this is definitely the best way to get good sound. Unfortunately, there aren't HDMI soundcards on the market yet which are capable of sending uncompressed multi-channel audio to HDMI receivers. The older SPDIF suffices though for music and home theater usage, and for that, there is a cheap solution: http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers - there's really no need to throw money at crappy companies like creative which deliver shitty products with bloated drivers unless you can't live without their precious EAX crap.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's move the DAC's to the biggest magnetic source in an audio system: THE SPEAKER, that's a good idea! Also, every speaker needs it's own amplifier, think before you post... What a waste.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about headphones? Not everyone likes to annoy people in a 10 km (6.21371192 miles) radius with their 50000W subwoofer-equipped sound system...

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Khyber]

Guess you've never built a power amp before. One bad tube or capacitor will introduce enough noise. A bad transformer can turn into a SGE and introduce so much noise you can't discern the signal from the noise floor. Let's not forget about the power inverter, which always produces some amount of noise.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then they wouldn't be speakers. They would be sound decoders. And since you have more than one, there are a myriad of annoying issues that could come up.

- Synchronization issues. If you send an audio stream out of a controller to multiple devices, all of these devices must have an internal timer and the audio stream must have a time-code. If one of the devices' timer gets out-of-sync, the whole thing is screwed.

- Rendering dissimilarities. You've about the differences between one type of audio gear and another. Tube amps vs. solid state, vinyl vs. CD, Bose vs. non-Bose. These are all flame-wars waiting to happen. Yet, that flame war would be turned into an electronic battleground between your speakers in your living room. One may render the audio stream with a Bose-y sound. Another speaker may render it accurately. Yet another might have a cheap class-C amp in it and add a ton of noise. The whole thing would sound like crap.

- Decoder differences. One decoder fills a buffer and splits it left/right. Another decoder fills a buffer and sends it fully to left or right, alternating between them each time. The audio streams are similar enough that it's possible for a renderer (speaker/processor) to mishandle a stream because the decoders are "close enough". (And by the way, the above illustration is the difference between WAV and AIFF, so it's not so far-fetched.)

- Codec misdetection. "MP3. No, wait. MPEG4-audio. No, wait. MPEG. Layer? No idea, we'll default to Layer 3." Who's going to guarantee that a given renderer even supports a certain codec? Who's going to guarantee that a given codec is supported properly? Sure, the market will sort it out eventually, but that doesn't help the poor saps that get stuck with a crap product.

Add to all of this the fact that you drive the cost way up by putting D/A converters into each speaker, and you get a stillborn product.

A much better idea is to have an external audio processor that drives traditional speakers. Single data feed, single amplifier (more power in a smaller package), and a single point of control over the sound. It works much better with fewer hassles.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Breakfast Pants]

Last time I checked, you aren't gonna get strange audio from Giga-anything. However, you might get some strange audio feedback from an amplifier amplifying sounds in the exact same frequencies you are sending it!

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[IdeaMan]

Actually you don't. My brain implant works wonderfully and it lets me experience ultrasonics with the utmost in fidelity.

People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

I like good sound and I haven't bought a sound card in 6 years or so (Nforce came out with very good integrated sound). Since then I run a single optical cable from my motherboard to my AV receiver; PERFECT sound. Even the HP at work driving my headphones from analog sounds great.

I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[Hackeron]

If you have a good quality digital pre-amp that's all fine - but it's cheaper to buy a good analog sound card and quality powered speakers or an analog pre-amp.

I wanted good quality stereo sound so I bought the Behringer B2031A speakers for around £200 and the M-Audio Revolution 5.1 for about £40 which together is cheaper than just the digital preamp capable of this kind of quality.

What pre-amp and speakers do you have?

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

I have a Denon AVR 1802 and Paradigm Monitor 3 speakers, nothing terrible expensive. It is not just quality but versatility that AV receiver gives you. Not only that, but I have guaranteed clean path to my reciever, the music stays digital over optical right to my receiver. I don't want to ever go back to analog sound coming out of a computer. Interference is a thing of the past.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[enoz]

NForce2 Soundstorm by any chance? I think NVidia integrated audio seriously went downhill after that, both in terms of driver support and hardware.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, CPUs. You're talking about Soundstorm, which I agree is a fantastic onboard sound solution, it's what I still use to this day in my audio box. The trouble is, Athlon (barton) 3200+ just doesn't kick as much ass as it used to. To say nothing of no PCI-E options, or RAM past 4 gig, or SATA2 or so forth. My point is, they don't make Soundstorm mobos anymore, and for people like you and I who like the idea of doing the D->A in the reciever rather than the computer this is our first high-quality economical option since the Xbox 1 (which also had a soundstorm mobo). It's big news even without the higher resolutions, frequencies, and number of channels. I'm thinking it's finally time to switch to PCI-E (I'm not a gamer).

My big question is can Asus come up with better software for upmixing stereo to 7.1 than nVidia did to get from stereo to 5.1? nVidia's software worked, but it was rather fragile... and linux support for it was a joke. Hey, that reminds me, I may finally be able to run this Ubuntu thing I've heard so much about (without switching back to windows just to get the sub channel going).

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[AbRASiON]

There are audiophiles out there who claim you can easily spot the difference with a high end audio card vs an onboard solution.
I guess it depends on your use of the thing, are you a music listener? Movie watcher, perhaps a gamer?

I am all 3 (only occassionally, I admit) but I have a 'proper' but basic home theatre reciever from a loungeroom hooked up to my onboard asus soundcard, it's a Pioneer VSX-D711 nothing major but it is a proper Dolby 7.1 reciever, accepts DD 5.1 signals, I think DTS and of course standard 3xRCA headphone analog signals.
It's coupled with 4 actual DECENT speakers, the sound I get out of my PC is far far superior to what most people have with a high end soundcard and 'PC Speakers"

Sure I might get better sound from a proper sound card too but I would wager that speakers and headphone quality is far far far more important than soundcard quality.
http://www.dansdata.com/m4kit.htm
4 of those, 400$ AUD
1 half decent reciever from ebay - 250$ AUD

No need to pay 120$ for a soundcard, not buying some crappy 'box set' of Klipsch, Bose or Logitech speakers either.

Onboard has been 'good enough' for a long long time.
Oh and as a bonus, if I ever give up PC gaming and move in with a wife / girlfriend / whatever I can put my Pioneer reciever under a half ddecent TV in the spare room, hook up my 4 'proper' speakers and use it as originally intended as a spare amp for TV / Xbox 360 / PS3 (since no doubt the wife would 'steal' the current receiver and HDTV in the regular loungeroom)

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[CheShACat]

By moving sound processing to an external sound processor instead of using on board, you're taking load off the CPU and thus earning those critical extra FPS that many people seek in a gaming rig. Also, millions of bedroom music producers (like me) need low latency audio processing which again requires dedicated hardware to do properly. "Good" sound isn't necessarily enough for everybody.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[poot_rootbeer]

I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.

I don't, either.

99% of the computer market has their audio needs met by the AC97 integrated into their motherboards. The other 1% -- audiophiles and home recording hobbyists -- are opting for specialized external DAC boxes, far from the noise inside the computer case.

I hope Creative has been planning alternate revenue streams, because the internal all-purpose sound peripheral is going to be pretty much extinct within the next few years.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

The last time I checked with multi core, multi-GHz cpus, games were no longer CPU limited, they are video card limited, the overhead for some tiny additional audio processing is negligible.

Also I have dedicated audio hardware to process my sound properly. It is called a Denon AV receiver. My computer does it's thing in the Digital domain where you don't need any special HW and and the motherboard will do it just as well as the most expensive sound card. The digital is then piped over an optical link to the receiver that is completely dedicated to Audio, where it will be decoded to analog and played back.

My original post was somewhat facetious. Of course some people still have a use for a dedicated sound card, but that market is shrinking fast and will soon be the province of people wanting to do high quality digital recording on a PC. For playback the on board solution can already be essentially perfect depending on what you connect it to.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[Anonymous Coward]

And then nVidia did us all a serious injustice and completely nerfed their audio chipset. My nForce2 audio is the best I have ever had and had all the features I wanted and none I didn't. I have had a VERY hard time trying to find a decent soundcard for my nForce4 system which outputs digital 5.1 on an optical line without seriously increasing CPU usage. I WANT MY NFORCE2 SOUNDSTORM BACK! :(

The only card I am really considering now is the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. It has all the best features of the Creative X-Fi cards and adds digital surround encoding on the optical outputs.

-Oobly

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[CheShACat]

The last time I checked with multi core, multi-GHz cpus, games were no longer CPU limited, they are video card limited, the overhead for some tiny additional audio processing is negligible. You make an incorrect assumption. If this were 100% true, there would not be a massive market for CPU overclocking features on gaming boards. I get a significant increase in framerate on modern games by overclocking my CPU, as do many others. Not forgetting of course that most game engines are still not optimised for multithreading.
The overhead may be marginal but there are plenty of obsessives out there to whom it is 'important'.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[CheShACat]

Also, processing necessary in gaming isn't restricted to encoding and decoding, there are hardware rendered effects (echoes, etc) that take power away from calculating in game physics, etc.
A quick google finds plenty of anecdotal evidence of ~ 5fps increase on games like Bioshock by just adding a soundcard, and some people claiming as many as 15fps (thoguh I agree that's doubtful).

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron.

Show me some actual tests on a multicore CPU done by some HW site. I have seen review sites do CPU scaling features and CPU impact is minimal in most games.

Unless you remove the Vidcard botlleneck, the CPU impact is trivial.

Here is an example test with Graphics set real low to avoid being the bottleneck:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/12772/3

Note even here, CPU has small effect. Only the slowest processor really have much impact. But this is an artificial situation, pretty much everyone runs with as much eye candy as their graphics card will support making the GPU the bottle neck and the CPU just about irrelevant.

The few cycles saved might matter to the largely irrelevant fringe with Triple-SLI/Quad Crossfire rigs, who's ego is tied to benchmark scores, but to the vast majority it is a complete non issue.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[CheShACat]

"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron I think you're confusing this with "anecdotal proof".

Here is an example test with Graphics set real low to avoid being the bottleneck: http://techreport.com/articles.x/12772/3 [techreport.com] Note even here, CPU has small effect I'm a bit confused as to how you can say this since the test you refer to shows an average difference of 40fps between high and low end CPUs on Oblivion, and 20FPS on Rainbow 6, in both cases expressed as a fairly smooth curve across the range tested.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

In that case it is using low graphics settings that no one would actually use. In reality the graphics card would bottleneck and the numbers would barely budge and the impact of a sound cards is even less than these big jumps in CPU speed.

Doh! should have read the original article, but I am really not interested in sound cards:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500/4

Actually gaming test. Do you really think it is worth paying $100 for that negligible increase in peformance. Again I think it is completely pointless for anyone other than those whose personal ego is attached to their benchmark scores.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[CheShACat]

In that case it is using low graphics settings that no one would actually use. The first article you linked was using preset "medium" settings. The second test you posted actually backed up word for word my "anecdotal" claims of ~5 FPS on Bioshock for onboard vs dedicated hardware.

Do you really think it is worth paying $100 for that negligible increase in peformance. I never said I did (I clearly put myself in the musician camp), just that there were many people who did agree it was worth it. I know quite a few people that have spent £1500 ($3000) plus on a rig and to spend $100 to reclaim the extra 5FPS in this instance could conceivably be seen as worth the extra outlay. All power to them at the end of the day, each to their own. [/thread]

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[guidryp]

The average difference was much less than 5fps. The integrated solution was actually fastest in 2 of the games. This the kind of difference only noticeable in a benchmark.

Re:Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for fr

[Xtravar]

Eh, at least it's ASUS and not another Apple spoogefest.

Where is the Linux support??

[Anonymous Coward]

Any GPL2 drivers out there?

Re:Where is the Linux support??

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like there are no Mac drivers either :( - Not much of an alternative to creative - at least creative release Linux and Mac drivers.

Sell me a 24 bit 192khz sound card

[heroine]

It's been over 15 years of web advertizing for 16 bit soundcards. Didn't 24 bit 192khz sound cards already beat Creative at something?

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[justinlindh]

I fought Linux sound problems with my integrated optical audio for the longest time. Nobody would help on the Ubuntu forums, but I eventually studied enough about .asoundrc to configure ALSA to work correctly. It was a pain, and in the end everything was working aside from the Rhapsody plug-in for Flash (flash uses an odd wrapper for audio in certain cases; YouTube worked, Rhapsody didn't).

It'll take a little learning and trickery, but if you want to fix this, you should be able to by scanning a few example .asoundrc files and documentation and configuring your own. It'll let you define a mixer and select the correct audio device for output, at which point ALSA will use it to properly mix.

Maybe the new PulseAudio stuff in Ubuntu works better. I have yet to test it.

Not hard

[OrangeTide]

Once you get around Creative's patents it is not hard to make a better card for less. Since Creative has a history of spectacularly bad sound cards.

Re:Not hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about the hardware itself, but Creative does indeed have a long and illustrious history of releasing spectacularly bad drivers. I remember having the misfortune of watching the Soundblaster Live! drivers literally nuke a working WinNT install (which had been rock solid up until that moment) ... full reformat/reinstall required.

It was at that point in time that I pledged I would sooner staple fire ants to my entire body and stab myself in the eyes with a mechanical pencil, than install or use another Creative product in any system I ever own. So far, it's a decision that's worked out well for me.

Re:Not hard

[OrangeTide]

I think the department of homeland security would be interested in these literal nukings.

there are know issues with SBlive and PCI timings that cause lockups (which you can fix in BIOS). and with the cards and VIA chipsets which cause disk corruption.

You might be surprised by M$' man-boobs

[PaulGaskin]

And how many people are latched onto them. Just look at all the Microsoft-friendly interlopers who are trying to subvert the free software movement. These people are suckling at the M$ teats.

Mac support?

[Hackeron]

As mac desktops don't come with PCI slots it is very difficult to find a better sound card than the onboard crap for Mac, only ones available are USB and Firewire and I haven't found an external one with sufficient sound quality.

Since this is PCI Express, does anyone know if Asus will be releasing Mac drivers?

Re:Mac support?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a "Mac"? Is that a new distribution of Linux I haven't heard of?

Re:Mac support?

[reidconti]

I'm glad I can't tell the difference between good and bad sound.

My Mac Pro's audio output (the analog one, at that!) goes to a cheap-ish Harman/Kardon stereo receiver and a pair of Paradigm Monitor 3's. I never understood why people spent $300-$400 on overdesigned plastic computer speaker setups when you could get a proper receiver and speakers for that much, even if they're nothing special.

Surround sound is enough of a PITA to setup in the living room, I don't need that hassle in my bedroom too.

Re:Mac support?

[Hackeron]

Err? - if I had a digital receiver and surround sound I wouldn't really care about getting a better sound card, but I have a pair of studio monitoring speakers (Behringer B2031A) connected directly to the analog output of my mac and there is hiss and distortion particularly during high load.

I don't only hear a very audible hum if the Mac is loaded, I can also hear myself move the mouse along the screen and that is why I want a better sound card.

Re:Mac support?

[Zemplar]

I don't only hear a very audible hum if the Mac is loaded, I can also hear myself move the mouse along the screen and that is why I want a better sound card. Hackeron, sounds like you need better shielded cables on all of your audio gear as I've never had that problem w/ analog on my MacPro. Perhaps something as easy as segregating your cables don't overly one-another (as much as possible) is all that's needed. +1 on the optical out!

Re:Mac support?

[Hackeron]

I'm using one of these: http://proleads.co.uk/shop/images/3.5mm%20to%202%20male%20XLR.gif (except my 3.5mm plug is not gold plated) - the cable is pretty thick and seems to have good screening - the cables are not overlayed at all and run directly from the PC to each speaker in a pretty much straight line.

Maybe I need to ground the 3.5mm plug - I've noticed when I push on it the hum situation gets a bit better (still noticeable though).

Would poor screening really make mouse movement audible? - or increase the hum significantly when playing a cpu/gpu intensive game?

Finally!!!

[dbleoslow]

High quality 'Chocolate Rain' at a price that won't make me turn my head the other way!

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[eldepeche]

The new release of Ubuntu comes with PulseAudio by default; it's a much better software mixer than ESD, and has ALSA and OSS emulation. Give it a shot.

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[Jonner]

Yeah, pulseaudio's working pretty well for me on Hardy. Flash even works well with pulseaudio with the libflashsupport package. There are some apps, such as Wine and some SDL apps that still have trouble, though.

Nice Converter chips, but noise makes them moot

[dontmakemethink]

I'm familiar with Cirrus and Burr-Brown (Texas Instruments) converter chips as being among the best in professional audio devices, in fact the best Protools interfaces (HD192) use Cirrus chips. But having an S/N ratio of 123dB is moot when the analog circuitry is unshielded and housed inside a computer, which is EMI and RFI hell.

The noise floor is going to be at least -66dB, so 57dB of dynamic range is lost to noise. That means the noise level is at least 724 times higher than the lowest discernable sound the card can process. If you're going to spend a penny to improve your computer's sound, it should go towards an external USB or Firewire device.

And don't get me started on "computer speakers". Try this: knock on the sides of your speakers. That resonance is added to every sound emitted from your speakers. Think a better sound card is gonna help?

Re:Nice Converter chips, but noise makes them moot

[Detritus]

I don't know if any sound cards do it, but I've seen microwave receiver cards for PCs that put all noise-sensitive circuits in little shielded boxes that are attached to the PCB.

Re:Nice Converter chips, but noise makes them moot

[dontmakemethink]

Same with cable TV receivers, and many digital devices like laptops have a cylindrical "lump" at the device end, which is an RFI filter. Because they require a relatively substantial iron mass, they're quite costly.

I have yet to see a PCI (or PCI-E) audio card with any such shielding, even the pro-sumer ones. And the consumer ones use minijacks, lightning rods for EMI and RFI. Presumably they know anyone that really cares will get an external audio device. But don't presume too much when it comes to audio, trust me...

Why can't we have something like soundstorm in new

[Joe The Dragon]

Why can't we have something like soundstorm in new MB and where are the real pci-e sound cards no ones that use bridge chips.

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[arodland]

Get a used-in-good-condition Audigy2. Pretty good driver, hardware mixing galore, and some other stuff that you don't think you want but may find out you actually do. And without the upsampling stupidity of the original Audigy.

EAX emulation...

[antdude]

How much CPU does it use up like on an old Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2; all updates)? The reason I bought an Audigy 2 ZS card was because of games that use EAX, especially v4.0.

Re:EAX emulation...

[Slashcrap]

How much CPU does it use up like on an old Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2; all updates)? Sorry, no idea. I have figures for an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2), but it's missing a few updates, so they wouldn't be of much use to you.

Re:EAX emulation...

[Lukiano]

I wonder if EAX emulation could be done with unified shaders (like physics)?

Dead Issue

[Niobe]

Wow! Quality in a consumer sound card?! This is a dead issue. The problem has been solved for years by brands building semi-pro and pro cards such as RME. Anyone with half-decent speakers who expects to enjoy music from a PC will not even begin to entertain the thought of using a Creative or an Asus card. Great AD/DA converters do not come for anywhere near $90.

Re:Dead Issue

[Boogaroo]

Lemme guess, you can hear the difference in the sound when using the gold plated optical fiber cables.

Re:Dead Issue

[Niobe]

I don't go anywhere near that far - mid-range card and speakers is it. Everyone I have A/B'd a good card with a Creative can hear the difference, even those that can't tell MP3 from CD quality. Does anyone find hearing their hard drive spin via their headphones acceptable???

Re:Dead Issue

[Datamonstar]

RME are NOT consumer cards. They are expensive and meant for audio production. I think you might be saying the same thing as me, but RME Hammerfall cards aren't even in the same league as anything Creative or Asus offers, including EMU.

Re:Dead Issue

[Niobe]

True they are used for audio production, but I use them for audio RE-production, i.e. listening. This is BECAUSE of the fact consumer cards offer such rubbish quality.

Re:Dead Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

If the optical fibre cables are completely gold plated (ends and all), you can DEFINITELY hear a difference.

Chaintech AV-710

[Manfesto]

I was going to plug the Chaintech AV-710, but it's apparently been discontinued - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829120103

A real shame - in audiophile circles, this was known as a great value card. Its heart was the Via Envy24 chip, which M-Audio uses (used?) in a number of their audiophile cards. If you spend most of your time listening to music and not necessarily producing it (the AV710 doesn't have any ins), for a mere $30, you got 24-bit/192KHz audio!

AV-710 + M-Audio Studiophile Monitors = awesome sonic accuracy on a relatively tight budget.

(for the uninitiated, Accurate Sound != Good Sound. Flat frequency response makes most overproduced music sound a bit weird :)

When it comes to sound quality, IMHO (not that I've ABX'd, so please take with a grain of salt), the AV-710, like all Envy24 cards, eats Creative cards for breakfast.

Anybody know of a currently available Envy24 card for cheap?

Hey, Geek! Does it fit in a x4 slot or only x1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this also go in an x4 slot? Or if worse came to worserest, an unused full-size x16, and if in the x16 does it use the full 8 lanes or just the 1? Thanks, Geek!

OpenAL

[apharmdq]

My main concern is OpenAL and Linux support. First off, Creative is pretty much the only company maintaining OpenAL, so what happens if they go down? OpenGL provides an alternative to Direct3D in the graphics area, and at the moment OpenAL provides the best alternative to DirectSound in the audio area, especially since it's cross-platform like OpenGL.

And more importantly, do these alternatives to Creative, such as MAudio and Asus, provide the same support for OpenAL that the Creative cards do? What about Linux? Creative is hardly the best example of cross platform audio drivers (see the X-Fi on Linux issues), but what about MAudio and Asus?

As much as I'd like to move on from Creative and use my consumer voting powers on a brand that's better for the consumer, I'm hard-pressed to find an alternative.

Re:OpenAL

[bersl2]

The open source OpenAL is 100% software; I found various posts from 2003 and 2005 that said that an in-house closed-source implementation for Windows uses the 3D acceleration available in their cards (with Creative-bashing to the faces of their engineers at no extra cost :P ).

Not really useful for that either

[melted]

There are better devices available for recording. They typically include a high quality preamp, which is not something you'll find on a sound card. I use Konnekt 8 from TC Electronic. It's less than 300 bucks, it provides multichannel recording, XLR inputs with phantom power and monitor out.

Createive is the anti-innovator

[Coolhand2120]

I've followed Creative Labs and the PC sound card evolution since the early 80's, before there was an ADLIB and I was trying to get my PC speaker to produce music. My first sound card was a Sound Blaster like a lot of people at the time. The card worked great, replaced ADLIB as the de facto standard, of which I never owned, and brought PC games into realistic sound reproduction.

Fast forward 5 years, creative still dominates the market with their sound blaster offering and now there are a few competitors that claim 'sound blaster compatible' to work with existing games, still DOS games mind you. Most of these cards were fine replacements for the creative offering at the time, an ISA slot Sound Blaster 16 (which was stereo!), some were garbage, but most worked just like the creative card.

Along comes windows95 and DirectX API to unify sound programming in games for windows! Yay, no more need for 'sound blaster compatible' any card with a functioning windows driver will work for any game. During over a decade of existence creative thus far has done nothing to make their sound card better than offer 'stereo' and a 16 bit ISA adapter to replace their original 8bit adapter. Now at this point the only 16bit card you've got in your system is the stupid creative SB LIVE!, or another competitor's card that might be PCI but otherwise the same.

Everything is about to change though, a new company enters the scenes, Aurel. Right off the bat the Aureal sound card is obviously superior to every sound card on the market. They only have PCI cards and they boast something that no other card has had thus far, real time effect processor! Now you can have reverb and parametric EQ's and time delays and any sort of crazy effect you can dream up! AND IT REAL TIME! All the processing is done on the card, so no extra CPU overhead, multichannel in/multichannel out, multichannel SPDIF out, the friggin works, and this is going up against the sound blaster live which boasts ..... STEREO, minor multi out functionality and a 16 bit slot.

This is where the story gets juicy and I'm sure quite a few people recall it. Creative backwards engineered or maybe just ripped off the processor design of the Audigy card, got sued for doing so, bought Aureal, stuck the almost EXACT same chip in their emuX series (Audigy) cards and haven't done a god damn thing since then and that was almost 10 years ago! All they seem to be able to do is make continuous copies of the chip Audigy designed almost a decade ago and sit on their asses while another company surpasses them in whatever the next PC sound evolution will be, then I guess they will buy them out and stop the innovation!

Re:Createive is the anti-innovator

[swordgeek]

I have my Diamond Monster MX300 card sitting on a shelf, sadly out of service. It was a great card. No, it really was a GREAT card. Unfortunately, the drivers got scarce after Diamond went under, and after years of fighting to make it work consistently and properly under Windows 2000, I broke down and bought a new card--an Audigy2 somethingorother.
It's a fine card, but there's absolutely no reason that a hundred bucks shouldn't buy you something comparable to an M-Audio card, at least in terms of input and output quality. Sadly, a complete monopoly on the market has stifled all innovation in the consumer sound card end. As always, Shiny and useless features win out over quality.

Re:Createive is the anti-innovator

[sznupi]

While win2k support is problematic...Microsoft somehow managed to get source for the unfinished 2k driver during XP development. Yep, Windows XP ships with full hardware A3D support. Just don't update the drivers via Windows Update, the newer version removes acceleration.

helpfull link: http://www.dayc.vispa.com/ (guides, downloads)

bluegears

[tadauphoenix]

Took the risk. The fiber connection to my Z-680's make a world of difference. Their software kills creative's suites of useless included apps too, in terms of audio options.

Not surprised - Asus rocks

[funkdancer]

I bought the more expensive Asus D2/PM in my HTPC last year and the quality of the thing just blows me away.

Whilst I'm mainly in Dolby Digital Live mode, I've switched to analogue out a few times for extra nice sound quality when playing back lossless CD rips (my entire collection of ~500 CDs, which are now suitably boxed up!). Now, in this case, up to 118db SN/R is better than anything I've played on the Rotel system before - cleanly blowing the old Rotel CD player out of the water; the sound quality is just pristine. Things are still good in DD mode and I must admit I mainly leave it there for all purposes.

Speaking of which, for playing back multi channel content (blurays, 720p H264s etc), the DD Live works _flawlessly_. My old Rotel preamp only accepts multi channel imput from an external DD decoder, and I'm holding out on an preamp upgrade as long as possible - hopefully until TrueHD is fully supported in the PC world - and with the Asus soundcard I can just play everything without having to worry about switching settings and the like. Whether it is DTS, DD, stereo or whatever, Asus tells Vista that "I'm a multi channel analogue soundcard - please send me 5.1", this happens, and then everything is real time encoded to DD. Perfect.

Having used Creative a lot before, I too got incredibly peeved off with their lack of driver support and many other issues - complete lack of respect for their customers being the #1 thing. I don't think I'll give them any more money for a long time. If nothing else, it's great that Asus delivers some serious competition to the market.

Having said all that, I'm looking forward to HDMI based soundcards that add TrueHD support. The difference in sound quality is said to be stupendous; with cheap TrueHD receivers outplaying high end non-uncompressed hifi gear costing many, many times their price.

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[guisar]

I picked up a Razer AC-1 card from Woot- you can find these for under $50. Works GREAT under Ubuntu- sounds much better than under MS Windows XP even though the Windows provides pop environments and such. I use drivers from the OSS project.

People with good gear?

[Sycraft-fu]

My front speakers cost about $1500 total, never mind the amp that drives them or other things. I don't think it is unreasonable that I get a decent soundcard for them.

Not everyone hooks their PC up to cheap speakers. If you do, wonderful, use the onboard sound. It is there so that people who don't need the best don't have to spend money on a separate soundcard. However there are plenty of people who use home theatre systems as their PC sound. For them, maybe a higher quality card is worth it.

Same thing with a monitor. If you are using an old CRT, ok sure the Integrated video is probably fine. However if you have a new professional LCD, maybe it is worth the money to buy a graphics card that properly supports it (for example has enough RAM to run at native rez and has a DVI port).

Along the graphics card line, there's the gaming thing to consider. One of the reasons you get a GPU is that it processes graphics faster, and can do better effects. Well, same deal with soundcards. Have a look at some of the tests comparing the X-Fi and ASUS cards with a Realtek chip (which is a popular onboard chip). You notice that the REaltek hits the CPU harder, supports less sounds at the same time, and doesn't support the advanced game features like EAX.

So even if your audio setup isn't high quality, maybe it is worth it just for better game experience.

Re:People with good gear?

[Pulzar]

Same thing with a monitor. If you are using an old CRT, ok sure the Integrated video is probably fine. However if you have a new professional LCD, maybe it is worth the money to buy a graphics card that properly supports it (for example has enough RAM to run at native rez and has a DVI port).

I get your audio argument, but that doesn't really fly with graphics. Integrated graphics don't have any problems driving large LCDs, and some even have HDMI on top of DVI outputs. That particular chipset easily beats a bunch of discrete video cards on the market, and you won't notice any difference between it and a high-end video card in most cases, no matter what monitor you use. In the audio world, you will always notice the difference between on-board and discrete audio, if you use a good pair of headphones.

Re:People with good gear?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well I don't know about newer integrated graphics, but older stuff simply lacked the RAM to drive high resolution displays. For example you need at least 128MB of video RAM to drive a 1920x1200 display with Vista's Aero, 256MB to go above that. Also, anything above 1920x1200 is going to require a dual-link output. Yes, we are talking high end LCDs here, but again that is the point. Same sort of deal with DVI. I am sure there are new chips on the market that support it, but it is real new. I've seen systems with 945G chipsets, more than capable of handling hardware good for Vista, and they all feature just VGA.

Re:People with good gear?

[dookiesan]

Most of what bothers me about my sound system is cell phone interference. Will fancy cables, better speakers, or a new sound card fix that? I know some speakers are worse than others, but after switching from onboard sound to a card I saw no improvement in this regard.

Why?

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't know where this idea comes from that you can't have good conversion inside a PC. Why not? For one, most of the electronics noise people fret over is waaaaay outside of the audio range. You find me a card that is even using opamps that respond at 2GHz, much less if you could hear it or not. However even for noise in the audible range, it isn't as though you can't design your card to simply deal with it. Take a Lynx Two, for example. That's a $1000 pro card that goes in your PC. RMAA rates the noise level at -115dB in loopback mode. That means in reality it is even better than that since in loopback you get all the noise of the outputs plus the inputs. I can't find any tests on an Audio Precision to show how good it really is, but suffice to say even better than the RMAA loopback (Lynx themselves says -117dB).

So really, it isn't an issue. There's nothing wrong with having an external soundcard, but the idea that you can't have very high quality in the PC is false.

S/PDIF and HDMI

[Namarrgon]

are the answer, and most motherboards have one or both of these built-in these days.

Never output an analogue signal from a PC, if you've got a choice. Internal D/A sucks, so do it externally. Either use decent powered speakers or an inexpensive integrated receiver, and the PC is removed from the sound quality equation completely.

I'm lovin' it, Creative

[Spinlock_1977]

Had a soundblaster, soundblaster live, awe64 gold, and after all those years of driver hell, swore I'd never give Creative another penny. 15 years later, not one more penny for any product any time.

If you believe in karma, it's great to see these rip-off bastards get pinched on a driver issue, and take a well-earned walloping. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving company. I'm lovin it Creative. Here's some more bullets... pick a foot.

Re:I'm lovin' it, Creative

[Gunuku]

I use an X-Fi in my gaming machine now but my next card definitely won't be a Creative after their Vista driver mess. The Asus seems to be the best choice for Vista gaming now. One question since all the audiophiles are in the thread: What's your preferred format for music compression? I play music on my machine and my iRiver, care about sound quality, and don't need tiny file size since I have terabyte storage. I have been using mp3 since I know it will work with everything out there, but I'm sure there's better formats now.

Re:I'm lovin' it, Creative

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your preferred format for music compression? FLAC is best.

Re:Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for fr

[Molochi]

Isn't any ad for Apple also a spooge for Asus?

Re:Hey, Geek! Does it fit in a x4 slot or only x1

[FuturePastNow]

An x1 card will fit in any PCIe slot, and it will only use one lane.

Am I seeing Solid Capacitors?

[Wolfier]

Neat! I look forward to the day when the electrolyte capacitors go the way of the Dodo.

wow, WTF is *this* shit?!?

[bersl2]

From the manual to this product:

Xonar D2X is introducing an innovative technology ÂDirectSound 3D Game
Extensions v1.0 (DS3D GX 1.0)- to restore DirectSound 3D Hardware acceleration
mode and its subsidiary EAX effects on Windows Vista for 3D games. Unlike some
proprietary API like OpenAL, DS3D GX doesn't require games to support OpenAL
API. All existing games compatible with Microsoft DirectX and DirectSound 2D/3D
will be supported with DS3D GX technology. Before you start EAX and DS3D HW
games, please enable DS3D GX on the Xonar D2X audio center, and disable the
function after the games.

(Emphasis added.)

I think I just now died a little bit on the inside.

Re:wow, WTF is *this* shit?!?

[Black Pete]

The next part after your bolded part is nonsense too:

Xonar D2X is introducing an innovative technology ÂDirectSound 3D Game
Extensions v1.0 (DS3D GX 1.0)- to restore DirectSound 3D Hardware acceleration
mode and its subsidiary EAX effects on Windows Vista for 3D games. Unlike some
proprietary API like OpenAL, DS3D GX doesn't require games to support OpenAL
API. All existing games compatible with Microsoft DirectX and DirectSound 2D/3D
will be supported with DS3D GX technology. Before you start EAX and DS3D HW
games, please enable DS3D GX on the Xonar D2X audio center, and disable the
function after the games.

Huh. I didn't realize that by using the OpenAL API, I was forced to use the OpenAL API.

Re:wow, WTF is *this* shit?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenAL is basically Creative's plaything these days - they control it and decide what goes in and doesn't. They also own the website (openal.org), which has lots of plugs for Creative products all over the place. There's no ARB containing members from multiple organisations like with its namesake OpenGL - it's a single-vendor standard.

Same monopoly principle as Creative

[aws910]

Think of it this way: The PFY at bestbuy will tell you Monster is the best, but he'll also try to sell you a Creative soundcard in the same breath.... do you see the pattern now?

All the audiophiles I've known said coat-hangers *did* sound better than monster cables, and that cables are a very important component of a quality system.

Re:Why can't we have something like soundstorm in

[Deathlizard]

There are many reasons soundstorm died. But there are two major ones.

1) very few MB manufactures did soundstorm right. Most of them tacked on cheap DSP's which would negate soundstorm quality. Fortunately if you had a digital speaker system you could get around this issue and talk directly to the MCP-T.

2) Nvidia didn't cover themselves. Basically they licenced part of their technology from Sensaura. Creative saw this so they did what they do best and bought them. This halted development of soundstorm drivers and eventually soundstorm itself. if Nvidia bought out Sensaura I doubt soundstorm would have been shelved. Apparently they learned something since they didn't mess around with Aegia once Intel bought Havok and basically killed off GPU software accelerated physics. They bought Aegia for it's software and are integrating it into their cards now.

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[Lord Kano]

But we'd all have to buy them "for work".

LK

Mod Parent Up

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chaintech AV-710 has been kept a secret by many audiophiles (the ones with a brain). It could be had for as little as $15 and was favorite on HydrogenAudio for a long time.

No optical out?

[sinij]

I just don't understand why would anyone in this age of decent built-in sound cards would get dedicated "premium" sound card without optical out? Please explain this to me.

Re:No optical out?

[Tridus]

IIRC, the article mentions an adaptor that comes with the card to let you use optical.

But spend a few dollars on good connectors...

[Lonewolf666]

In my time at university, I've participated in a group of hi-fi enthusiasts who were, among other things, building a high quality 2-way loudspeaker. During development, at one point we tried assembling the crossover with alligator clips to save time in testing.

As a result, the perceived sound quality took a nosedive. Soldering the same components together gave much better results. Lesson learned: substandard connectors will make a difference you don't like.

But then again, you should get a set of gold-plated connectors for much less than $300. I went with 4mm gold plated lab connectors for my own rig, soldered to no-name coax cables (cannibalized from some defunct PA equipment). The whole stuff cost maybe $40 in today's prices, and I'm quite happy with the results.

So?

[Icarium]

I fail to see how the fact that some onboard sound solutions suck equates into all onboard sound solutions sucking? I've never had any problems, driver or quality wise, with the onboard sound on any of my PC's.

Unless you're an audiophile, you normally get what you pay for. If you pay for cheap sound, you get cheap sound.

You obviously didn't RTFA

[TigerTime]

The onboard sound causes the CPU to work overtime. If you have a good external sound card then you can increase FPS in games by about 5fps and reduce the CPU load because the load is run by the external card.

Just look at the Realtek vs Creative or ASUS CPU/gaming comparisons in the article. They both blow Realtek out of the water when it comes to helping your computer run faster.

Re:You obviously didn't RTFA

[schnikies79]

I gave very, very little so it's not an issue.

5fps is not worth ~$90.

Re:You obviously didn't RTFA

[TigerTime]

That's fine. I just wanted to clarify that you were misspoken in your first comment in saying "I would rather the computer be fast than sound like a home theater".

That is a misleading statement in thinking that a sound card somehow causes your computer to run slower. A sound card is alot like a video card. They will make your computer run faster than onboard video.

Re:You obviously didn't RTFA

[LoverOfJoy]

How many FPS faster can you get by a $90 more expensive CPU, video card, RAM etc? My guess is a lot more than 5 fps unless you already have a top of the line CPU, video card, etc.

Re:You obviously didn't RTFA

[schnikies79]

I didn't mean that a sound card would make my computer slow. I meant that I can used the money saved from not buying the sound card and put that towards a better process/more ram/better video card, etc.

Re:You obviously didn't RTFA

[aliquis]

But how does more FPS help when you listen to music?

I thought the X-Fi does support Dolby Digital Live

[skintigh2]

but creative disabled it in drivers

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[crimsun]

Make sure the appropriate SDL package with PulseAudio support is installed (libsdl1.2debian-pulse in universe). As for the "problematic" apps, there's always pasuspender (e.g., `pasuspender -- skype'. The Ubuntu Studio guys already do this in a jackd wrapper for qjackctl).

Yeah, Right!!!

[David_Hart]

A sound card is a sound card is a sound card. If it quacks like a duck and I can hear it, then I am perfectly happy. Seriously guys, looking at the graphs in the link I see minor differences between the cards. However, I didn't see anything that indicated that I would "hear" any difference.

I have a used Audigy 2 ZS pro hooked up to a Creative 7.1 surround sound speaker system. My MP3s (384K VBR), games, apps, etc. all sound perfectly fine. As other posters have stated, if I want to have a quality listening experience, I'll use my digital optical out to my Denon receiver. The sound is just too limited and distorted by computer speakers.

In fact, it's always good for a laugh to listen to the infomercials tell the audience that a pair of small speakers and a subwoofer will equal the quality of a decent 5.1 surround setup. But that's another topic....

David

Re:Sound Cards (not just for games)

[Ox0065]

Well, onboard sound is getting better, for what that's worth. And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.

But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell. It's kind of like suggesting upgrading your monitor or video card if you're only going to be watching YouTube. Hopefully at least a few developers are using high quality sounds in their games... (^-^) some people use their computers for more than just gaming. (^-^)
I hear that there are some people who use their computer to, like, MAKE games. for real!!!
They might even, like, have the original CDs & everything, like before they became .MP3s

objective engineering

[epine]

You're missing the main point, which was central to Shannon's theorem from way back in 1948: an optimal digital encoding process will achieve 100% quality up to, but not exceeding, channel capacity as dictated by the noise model.

Corrupted bits are easy to detect on the receiving side of any digital channel with a relatively trivial modicum of error correction.

If the receiving end of the digital channel sucks so bad it doesn't have a way to report that bits are being dropped or corrupted due to a substandard link, why not just randomly spend three to ten times as much to buy a possibly superior cable, and still be uncertain at the end of the day if you solved the problem, or even if the problem originally existed.

While you're at it, take a walk through the wild side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Now why is it that all this high end digital audio equipment can't be equipped with a little orange LED that signals digital link fault (lost or corrupted bits)?

Gosh, could it be that it's just not possible to run a mid-grade LSFR in silicon at audio data rates to detect channel bit errors?

The consumer audio industry is built on the fundamental premise: at every juncture, remain subjective.

My DVD player doesn't report bad frames or bit recovery statistics. Internally, the stupid thing knows. It just refuses to say. If I could stick a balky DVD into a couple of different players to see if I get the same error profile, it would be pretty easy to figure out whether the disk or the player was at fault. I guess that would only benefit the consumer, not the vendor.

I don't care whether your amp cost $20k. If it doesn't have an indicator for link faults concerning its digital inputs, the company isn't in the business of enabling objective decisions.

A properly engineered digital channel exists in an objective evaluation space. It's impossible to stress this strongly enough. No matter how much the equipment costs, if the quality of the digital channel is not reported objectively, either the equipment was badly engineered, or engineered to an agenda that conflicts with objectivity.

If you find that hard to swallow, consider the PRML algorithm used to recover bits from the analog signal reported by your drive head. Bit error rates of 10^-14 from an analog signal that is at best only a weak facsimile of the signal originally recorded, extracted at Gbits/s by a chip the size of your fingernail, in a product costing under $100.

The disk drive people find solutions, where the audio people facing a problem three orders of magnitude less difficult manufactures vagueness.

Guess which group read and understood Shannon's theorem, and wished their customers to benefit from this excellent piece of work. Before Shannon's paper, smart engineers did suffer from confusion about whether digital perfection was a reality or a chimera. Sixty years later, it's sadly ignorant that this is still debated.

Recording

[DeskLazer]

Why does no one mention the fact that this card has ASIO 2.0 support? Does anyone know if WaveRT is supported? I don't use Cakewalk Sonar, but Xonar in Sonar with WaveRT might get some people moist in their nether regions.

proof [at least, the PCI-E version]: http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=25&l2=150&l3=0&l4=0&model=2015&modelmenu=2 [under driver features]

I have to decide between this and the M-Audio Revolution [I need ASIO support]. Any suggestions either way?

Re:Sound Cards (not just for games)

[SanityInAnarchy]

I was basing this on the "people who spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card" -- that doesn't sound like a gamer to you?

Someone who makes games would still likely fit my description -- apparently, plenty of games still use mp3, which is really strange, when better codecs are available for free (flac, ogg). In addition, if they're employed, they probably don't buy their own computer.

And someone who has the original CDs is kind of rare now, vs someone who just has everything in iTunes, and couldn't tell you what format it's in.

CPUs RAM?

[aliquis]

Your CPU have RAM in amounts which matters? Cool, most people in here probably use something x86-based thought ..