$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

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: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.

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: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: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: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: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?

[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).

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: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.

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: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

[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.

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!