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$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."
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.
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
Words to men, as air to birds.
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.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
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.
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
Democrat delenda est
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.
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?
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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.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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....
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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.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
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.
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.
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.
..... STEREO, minor multi out functionality and a 16 bit slot.
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
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!
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
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
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.