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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!
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
Words to men, as air to birds.
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.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
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.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Come on people, this is not funny :)
Somebody mod me down NOW!!!
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.
..... STEREO, minor multi out functionality and a 16 bit slot.
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
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!
(Emphasis added.)
I think I just now died a little bit on the inside.