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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."
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...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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.
Kid-proof tablet..