$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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

Any info on ALSA support?

[Daniel Phillips]

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

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?

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

[Kenrod]

It must be press release Tuesday at Slashdot.

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.

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: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?

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.