$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

[SanityInAnarchy]

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...

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

[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: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

[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: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

[drgonzo59]

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.

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

[billcopc]

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.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that a real sound card is needed for gaming. But most people are surprisingly deaf and can't hear the difference, and so most game companies don't want to spend the time and money on proper audio.

One of the best games to demonstrate the difference between onboard and hardware-accelerated audio is Bioshock. Using my onboard Realtek HD with 5.1 speakers, I get a muddy mess of sounds. I couldn't stand it and decided to get an X-Fi and the difference is amazing. I can hear the difference between sounds coming from, say, down the stairs or just round the corner. Watery echos and long hallways sound like the would.

Sound is not just some bonus feature, like DX10 vs DX9. It adds significantly to your perception. I still remember the exhilaration when I upgraded to 5.1 sound and was able to spin around and frag someone just behind me because of the accurate positional audio. And there are of course stories of blind people playing video games entirely by sound.

Re:Sound Cards

[jandrese]

I just wish USB soundcards weren't such a hack. It always seemed to me that firewire would be perfect for external sound cards, but nobody seems to do that, at least not at the consumer level.

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

[IronChef]

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.

Re:Sound Cards

[dgatwood]

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....

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.

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

[c_forq]

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.

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

[adolf]

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.

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

[UncleRage]

And here's another voice from the choir.

My main sound comes from a M-Audio Firewire Audiophile running into an Anthem preamp, Adcom amp and then into a set of B&W's for monitors.

What's my Audigy 2 used for? Skype.

Creative makes such trash.

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.

Re:Sound Cards

[Hal_Porter]

At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".

All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.

That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drivers.

[PaulGaskin]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit, being subsidized to keep drivers out of the hands of free software developers?

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?

Re:Linux

[Lisandro]

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.

Moot with Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since EAX doesn't work in Vista anymore, does this really matter anymore?

Any info on ALSA support?

[Daniel Phillips]

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

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: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).

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit Yes, esp. considering Microsoft has no tits and if it did, they'd be nasty man-boob type tits that nobody wants to see or even acknowledge their existence.

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?

Re:tell the difference?

[TheMeuge]

"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.

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:tell the difference?

[ThePhilips]

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.

Re:tell the difference?

[jmorris42]

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.

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.

Re:tell the difference?

[maxume]

Damn it, I wanted to crack wise about digital cables.

I was going to go for something like "If a good cable costs $300, how much does a good DIGITAL cable cost?".

Re:tell the difference?

[turing_m]

Don't forget the $480 wooden knobs, for that rich, warm sound.

Re:tell the difference?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well, actually with digital cables you do need to get a proper one, if you are doing a sufficient length. Now I say proper, not good, because what matters is impedance. Digital audio is pretty high frequency (as much as 25MHz for 192kHz stuff) and as such the cable acts like a wave guide as it does for video. Well, like with video it is a 75-ohm coax cable that you need. So while you don't need anything pricey, you do need to make sure you don't just use any old cable for digital audio.

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:M-Audio - blatant plug

[VGPowerlord]

I don't do audio work, but everyone I know who does serious audio work on a PC seems to have an M-Audio Audiophile card of some sort.

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

[Kenrod]

It must be press release Tuesday at Slashdot.

Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Please don't mod me funny, I'm asking quite seriously. If it runs with open source drivers, does 7.1 and has hardware mixing so that I don't have to bother with dmix, I'm buying it tomorrow morning.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Come on people, this is not funny :)

Somebody mod me down NOW!!!

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.

Why bother

[hack slash]

Improved sound quality? What for? I've got tinnitus you insensitive clod.

Re:Kudos to Asus

[0xdeadbeef]

WTF? Two girls one cup? On YouTube? That ain't going to last long. I think what you meant to post was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Marrow]

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.

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?

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[enoz]

Last time I checked, amplifiers didn't have 100 million transistors operating up to Gigahertz pumping out EMF.

Anyway I agree with the GP (is the Parent a troll?).

If you have a digital source you may as well keep the signal digital for as long as possible because as soon as you go through a DAC you will start introducing noice into the equation.

Digital Receivers (amps) take a digital input such as PCM or AC3, decode, and pump the output to speakers. And they sound great.

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:People still buy soundcards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, CPUs. You're talking about Soundstorm, which I agree is a fantastic onboard sound solution, it's what I still use to this day in my audio box. The trouble is, Athlon (barton) 3200+ just doesn't kick as much ass as it used to. To say nothing of no PCI-E options, or RAM past 4 gig, or SATA2 or so forth. My point is, they don't make Soundstorm mobos anymore, and for people like you and I who like the idea of doing the D->A in the reciever rather than the computer this is our first high-quality economical option since the Xbox 1 (which also had a soundstorm mobo). It's big news even without the higher resolutions, frequencies, and number of channels. I'm thinking it's finally time to switch to PCI-E (I'm not a gamer).

My big question is can Asus come up with better software for upmixing stereo to 7.1 than nVidia did to get from stereo to 5.1? nVidia's software worked, but it was rather fragile... and linux support for it was a joke. Hey, that reminds me, I may finally be able to run this Ubuntu thing I've heard so much about (without switching back to windows just to get the sub channel going).

Re:Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for fr

[Xtravar]

Eh, at least it's ASUS and not another Apple spoogefest.

You might be surprised by M$' man-boobs

[PaulGaskin]

And how many people are latched onto them. Just look at all the Microsoft-friendly interlopers who are trying to subvert the free software movement. These people are suckling at the M$ teats.

Re:Sound cards. Don't talk to me about sound cards

[eldepeche]

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.

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?

EAX emulation...

[antdude]

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.

Re:EAX emulation...

[Slashcrap]

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)? Sorry, no idea. I have figures for an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2), but it's missing a few updates, so they wouldn't be of much use to you.

Re:Dead Issue

[Boogaroo]

Lemme guess, you can hear the difference in the sound when using the gold plated optical fiber cables.

Re:So, which card to buy?

[enoz]

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.

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!

S/PDIF and HDMI

[Namarrgon]

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.

Re:People with good gear?

[Pulzar]

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.

Am I seeing Solid Capacitors?

[Wolfier]

Neat! I look forward to the day when the electrolyte capacitors go the way of the Dodo.

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.

objective engineering

[epine]

You're missing the main point, which was central to Shannon's theorem from way back in 1948: an optimal digital encoding process will achieve 100% quality up to, but not exceeding, channel capacity as dictated by the noise model.

Corrupted bits are easy to detect on the receiving side of any digital channel with a relatively trivial modicum of error correction.

If the receiving end of the digital channel sucks so bad it doesn't have a way to report that bits are being dropped or corrupted due to a substandard link, why not just randomly spend three to ten times as much to buy a possibly superior cable, and still be uncertain at the end of the day if you solved the problem, or even if the problem originally existed.

While you're at it, take a walk through the wild side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Now why is it that all this high end digital audio equipment can't be equipped with a little orange LED that signals digital link fault (lost or corrupted bits)?

Gosh, could it be that it's just not possible to run a mid-grade LSFR in silicon at audio data rates to detect channel bit errors?

The consumer audio industry is built on the fundamental premise: at every juncture, remain subjective.

My DVD player doesn't report bad frames or bit recovery statistics. Internally, the stupid thing knows. It just refuses to say. If I could stick a balky DVD into a couple of different players to see if I get the same error profile, it would be pretty easy to figure out whether the disk or the player was at fault. I guess that would only benefit the consumer, not the vendor.

I don't care whether your amp cost $20k. If it doesn't have an indicator for link faults concerning its digital inputs, the company isn't in the business of enabling objective decisions.

A properly engineered digital channel exists in an objective evaluation space. It's impossible to stress this strongly enough. No matter how much the equipment costs, if the quality of the digital channel is not reported objectively, either the equipment was badly engineered, or engineered to an agenda that conflicts with objectivity.

If you find that hard to swallow, consider the PRML algorithm used to recover bits from the analog signal reported by your drive head. Bit error rates of 10^-14 from an analog signal that is at best only a weak facsimile of the signal originally recorded, extracted at Gbits/s by a chip the size of your fingernail, in a product costing under $100.

The disk drive people find solutions, where the audio people facing a problem three orders of magnitude less difficult manufactures vagueness.

Guess which group read and understood Shannon's theorem, and wished their customers to benefit from this excellent piece of work. Before Shannon's paper, smart engineers did suffer from confusion about whether digital perfection was a reality or a chimera. Sixty years later, it's sadly ignorant that this is still debated.