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Do You Really Need a Discrete Sound Card?
crookedvulture writes "Integrated audio has become a common freebie on motherboards, causing many to question whether there's any need to have a sound card. Tech Report took a closer look at the issue by testing the latest integrated Realtek codec against a couple of sound cards: Asus' $30 Xonar DG and its considerably more expensive $280 Xense cousin. Everything from gaming performance to signal quality is explored, and it's the blind listening tests that prove most revealing. The integrated solution is obviously flawed, and in a bit of a surprise, the cheaper Xonar is the one most preferred. Discrete sound cards certainly have their benefits, and you don't need to spend a lot to get something that sounds a lot better than the average motherboard."
I would like it point out that a good card lets you recieve certain inputs that a normal card would not, such as both coax and optical SPDIF. I also would say that much of the audio quality comes from the DACs and Sampling rate conversion.
Sound cards used to be sold because their ability to decode sound was done on the card rather than having the CPU doing it, which would slow down the gaming performance (somewhat). I'm sure that sound cards also have other features not found in on-board chipsets, but most of those are for things like high end gaming.
About 7 years ago I remember getting an on-board NVIDIA chipset that had hardware decoding of mp3 files. The CPU utilization of the system without the hardware decoding the CPU jumped to about 45% continuous while playing back the mp3 file. On the rig with the NVIDIA chipset with hardware decoding the CPU utilization was nearly imperceptible. It became to expensive for NVIDIA to offer those for long so they replaced them with generic sound chipsets.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
7 years ago a new system would have been built with a 1.8-2.3Ghz Athlon XP or a 2.5-3.5Ghz Pentium 4. If you managed to make an MP3 decode eat up 45% of the CPU with any of those chips, you were doing something horribly wrong.
I read the internet for the articles.
Sound quality matters, but sometimes small features that one might usually overlook even more.
For example, say that you have a nice speaker setup and a good amp, but an aging pre-amp that can no longer decode the latest audio formats. If you run things with a PC, the pre-amp is basically a very expensive DAC. If you can find a sound-card with good DAC's on it you can, in theory, just toss the old pre-amp and connect your computer directly to your amp.
Problem! When a computer boots up, a large voltage spike goes through its various components including the audio card. With many audio cards or audio chipsets this spike goes right out the line to your amp, which dutifully amplifies it into a very large CRAWHOOMP!!! Besides causing your cat or dog to projectile defecate on whatever it happens to be near at the time, this can also damage your speakers and/or amp!
How do other components like pre-amps get around this problem? Good audio components all have some way of electrically isolating their outputs from the rest of the device so that these power-up CRAWHOOMP's don't happen. This usually means electromechanical relays. This is why your expensive amp or receiver usually makes some clicking noises moments after being powered up. That's the relays clicking into place once voltage levels have normalised.
Good audio cards, like the Asus Xonar series, also have these now. On-board chip-sets usually do not since it would add a few dollars to the price of the board and most people don't plug their computers output directly into an expensive amp and speakers.
Long story short, what audio components you hook up to your computer and how you hook them up both have a large impact on the features you need in your computer's audio card. For a long time, computers had zero chance of replacing pre-amps because almost all audio cards lacked the small features that good audio gear almost universally possesses. That's changing, and about time too!