$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

[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.

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: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!

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.