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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."
As opposed to what? Continuous sound card?
I don't think that I have put a sound card in a game rig in the past 5-8 years. Does anyone still use them besides people who have some some special need for them?
I was plagued with choppy audio under W7 until I disabled my Realtek sound chip and got a Turtle Beach PCI card. Actually, IIRC, CoD4 refused to run at all with Realtek. Never had a problem with it under Linux though. Of course, YMMV.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Agreed, when my friends and I started podcasting with multiple people we found ourselves looking into audio cards at Newegg for the first time in a decade.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Only if what you listen to requires discretion.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Your SB16 came w/ SCSI? I feel ripped off - mine has an IDE Controller on it.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I don't.
But I don't do anything that revolves around audio.
Of course 99.5% of the people who claim to be audiophiles and claim they can 'tell the difference' don't need one either. Its just a different type of epenis.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Years ago, I got Ghost Recon for Christmas. I had all the minimum specs of the game - and most of the recommended - but one thing never mentioned was a sound card. Now, for normal singleplayer gameplay there was almost never an issue. However, when playing online, where there could be anywhere from 16 to 32 sounds going at once, my game would slow to a screeching hault for the length of the gunfight - essentially making me useless online. I couldn't even play the support class because a full auto-machine gun tended to slow things down a bit, so I never went anything but the sniper and would always run to the flanks to try and avoid my game from hearing any sounds besides my own shots. Had to disable music and some ambient effects just to get that going.
Since then, now that I'm older and I can afford things on my own - I've never gotten a computer for gaming without a soundcard. I never want to be in that situation again, and I figure dedicated hardware was the way to go (like a good Graphics card helps with the display of things obviously, so I naturally assume a sound-card provides the same assistance with audio).
Now - whether that's still the case, could I go and grab the latest game, meet minimum specs, and have audio cause lag? I don't know. If so, I think soundcards are still necessary. Especially for the EAX effects and such.
Asus'
Asus's
I like Mr. Jones.
I am going to Mr. Jones's house to meet his wife.
It's hard keeping up with the Joneses.
The Joneses' house is quite pretty.
Do you get it yet?
I have a MB with a built in RealTek sound 'card'. I also run Windows XP 64, cause I'm crazy. The RealTek system for XP 64 is notoriously unstable. When I played Champions Online, the game would disable the sound because it could and would crash the program. Borderlands took it the other route - you can run the program, but you will always crash when you hit level 10, due to the special level 'ding' sound for level 10. Solution? Get a sound card, or a new OS.
Oh yeah, need something to power this 2X CD-ROM drive. Now if I can just find my CD caddy so I can load it...
I actually remember both of those, *and* why you would need those particular solutions back in the day. (For those of you youngsters, PC motherboards prior to the mid-90s were not blessed with the on-board ports that are standard today...)
-MT.
-MT.
Realtek's sound chips / drivers don't play nice with a few games I enjoy, namely NWN1 & other Aurora Engine games.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Actually, the built in sound cards are pretty decent, for virtually everything (games, music, videos, etc). The average person doesn't care.
The built in cards are no more free than the on-board IDE/SATA/USB/network. It's part of the board and it has a component cost. Just because a component can be replaced with a PCI card doesn't mean that the on-board component is free.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
They reveal the authors insistence on going into excruciating detail on everything. Maybe his attention to detail makes him a better audio engineer/evaluator, but honestly we would have been fine with "The subjects preferred X card for Y music by a substantial margin"...
As opposed to what? Continuous sound card?
You know, do you need a sound card that doesn't let your roommate or neighbor know that you listen to porn all day?
My work here is dung.
I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS I purchased in 2004. My 2007-ish motherboard sound device is turned off in BIOS. Why? Two reasons:
1) Motherboard sound is full of noise and glitches (pops and clicks).
2) Even more importantly: The onboard sound hardware *actively interferes* with sound under Linux. I have to turn it off, or I have mysterious and disruptive sound problems. Such as fmod using 100% of CPU cycles.
I can only speculate on the real cause of #2, but if experience is any guide, it's due to half-baked hardware that only "works" with a Windows-only driver.
This is why I put "works" in quotes: Even when integrated sound hardware works under Windows, it doesn't necessarily work all that well. I bought the Sound Blaster because the integrated audio on the PC I built in 2003 was also flaky.
The Audigy 2 ZS works absolutely fine under Ubuntu, so that's what I use. Yes... ... I have zero problems with this card and PulseAudio. But the onboard sound device is a piece of junk. Motherboard manufacturers throw in the cheapest junk they think they can get away with. They certainly don't give a damn whether it works in Linux.
My Gigabyte MB has integrated Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround sound. I don't need to drop another $280 for sound unless I am getting more speakers
The world is how you make it
If you buy a set of not-too-expensive surround speakers (I have the Edifier 501s - a bargain at $150 a few years ago) then you should go for a discrete soundcard imho. If you're just going to pipe the sound through a couple of $5 speakers, then don't bother.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
People like vinyl better than digital audio sometimes. This isn't new. Leave discrete cards to us professionals and audiophiles. You iPod earbud wearing types, feel free to use integrated stuff. It's much better than it used to be. It's not external, but anymore it doesn't need to be. It's "good enough". Why is this a debate?
I have a m audio delta 2940 PCI card I bought on ebay and hooking it up to my Tripath 2020 amp with fostex full rangers literally (figuratively) blew me away. The quality of the output compared to the rear output on the SBLive (kx drivers) was night and day. Amazing. I got it to do some digitisation of old audio recordings.
Does anybody have any quantitive measurements of the Apri 2010 Mac book pro As i'm interested in doing some recording with that wondered how good a quality I'm likely to get.
My HTPC uses my ATI card as the soundcard - HDMI audio. Which is nice because it does support the necessary protected path audio so I can play my blu-rays and send the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio over HDMI.
My laptop has a USB dongle that encodes 5.1 audio into a DTS or DD stream so I can play games with surround. Again, not likely something to have onboard anymore (the old nVidia chipsets used to have a DD encoder).
And there's also the music (though usually they go for Firewire or USB interfaces?) angle where they need low-latency and a bunch of interfaces (MIDI, multichannel audio, etc).
Discrete sound cards are still useful in niche areas - HTPCs with HDMI out, getting 5.1 without a ton of analog cables (using a digital path), and low-latency/high-quality music uses. But for the general population, they're pretty much dead except for the hardcore gamer that wants to get an extra .1 FPS because their soundcard offloads the 3D sound mixing. Maybe the only other area may be to the purist who wants better DACs than the cheap crap they put on onboard audio, though they would probably just use a digital output in some way.
Toslink, will get you DD 5.1 with zero interference from the EMI in the case =) Of course now I've upgraded to using the codec in my 5750 so I can bitstream any format.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
it depends on what you buy. i bought a creative x-treme music card years ago. its sound quality (coupled with an altec lansing fx6021 speaker set) is "beyond". i have stopped using our family's beloved 5 rack pioneer set with its expensive speakers.
both x-treme music card and altec lansing fx6021 were rather cheap. no, you really dont need to spend $400 on a hipster-labeled 'Beyond gameRx SuperCardBrand', but, you should spend some if you want to get some.
unfortunately both xtreme music and fx6021 are not on the market anymore. i can understand that sb moved onto new cards (despite having a very bad batch after x-treme music), but i cannot understand why altec stopped making stellar in-concert array speakers like fx6021 and moved to 'hipster appledy' shit.
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In my experience, the only time it's worth having a discrete sound card is if you have a kick-ass set of headphones (or speaker setup). For the average $100 set of headphones/$400 speaker setup? Totally unecessary. Now, it's worth it if you want "surround" virtualization with headphones, but otherwise, again, totally unecessary.
Of course, if you truly care about sound quality, you'll just use a digital output (either through USB or Optical) and buy a nice external DAC, thereby completely bypassing any potential electrical interference generated from a sound card.
Note: I run an ATH-AD700 off my built-in sound card and I think it sounds great, so no accusations of audiodouchebaggery on my part, please.
Living With a Nerd
That question really seems to depend on your budget and your motherboard...
If you are in the really cheap seats, you should probably spend whatever audio money you have on speakers or headphones that don't utterly suck. OK speakers/headphone drivers are still much trickier than OK silicon amps and DACs. On the other hand, a lot of today's fancy motherboards are happy to output S/PDIF in your choice of optical or electrical, which lets the DACs and amplification in your receiver, which can be of virtually arbitrary niceness, do the job. I'm sure there is some way that realtek can manage to fuck up dumping a pure digital bitstream across a purely digital bus; but it'll take some doing.
Only in the middle, where you have speakers/headphones nice enough to hear subtle imperfections(or just cranked so loud that you are getting repeatedly trampled into the noise floor) and the budget left over for a nice discrete card does it really make any sense. That and, of course, application specific stuff like audio recording, since motherboards don't exactly come with a bevy of XLR jacks...
The days when all that software positional audio dragged your overclocked celeron 333 down and wrecked your FPS framerates just aren't really with us anymore...
That's actually not a bad idea. I wonder how complex your algorithms would have to be to determine if the sounds produced are of gunshots or female moans.
Too many times I've either gone from an FPS to a naughty website or vice versa and either the volume was left down or too high and either I can't hear the game or some horny girl can be heard all throughout the house.
What I need is a dedicated card that can handle all that for me - anytime I try to set up different volume controls per application in Windows, it never sticks.
used to spend $250 or so on a sound card in the old days but in the last few years the onboard chips have become good enough. the worst part about the old Audigy cards was you had to install all the crappy software that most people didn't use
How am I supposed to gloat about how awesome my sound setup is if I don't have a discrete sound card? Instead of wasting time with blind listening tests, they should go to a bar, walk up to a woman and say:
versus
This is what I call real-life testing scenarios.
Dude, I remember back in the day when I got a Creative AWE 64 Gold card. That's right, the ISA one with the gold-plated RCA outputs, expandable RAM, and general kickassery.
I still have the shiny plastic bit that came on the front of the box! It's sitting just to the left of the framed Fuckwad Theory print.
Living With a Nerd
I've tried researching this for some time on-line, and haven't found a clear answer.
I want:
1. Surround sound in game.
2. Surround sound over headphones.
3. Environmental effects.
4. Decent sound.
This should be what most gamers want, right? I can't be the only person out there wearing headphones, and when I got environmental effects to work on my old-gen M-Audio in Half-Life 2, they sounded awesome (unfortunately, the Sensaura drivers for that feature were bad and it didn't work most of the time).
I've heard new games can provide environmental noise effects without dedicated EAX - is that true?
Is surround over regular headphones effective? I don't see it advertised as a feature any more. Have companies just given up on it?
Hey! When not using my headphones, I use the speakers built into my monitor, you insensitive clod!
Living With a Nerd
I always end up with the opposite. The gun shots are so loud I pretty much assume that there is a drive-by outside and am surprised my neighbors in my apartment complex do not call the cops for me shooting somebody in my house, and then when I watch some awesome porn, I can't hear the storyline, and nothing is worse than not knowing the storyline.
I know he is supposed to be a repairman fixing the cable, but maybe he has another motive.
The world is how you make it
are you out of your mind?
Out of hundreds of people that I interact with during any given week, none of them have $400 speakers hooked up their PEE CEE.
no wonder this country is going to shit.
Yes, yes, we get it, your audiophile sensibilities are so much more refined than our plebian ears. But if the average listener can plug into a 30 dollar card and a 300 dollar monstrosity and not hear any difference, isn't the person not sensatized to tiny imperfections in sound output getting the better deal here?
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
Despite Creative's very rocky buggy drivers early on and design issues with early X-FI's The Fatality Tittanium card has been incredible compared to my built in audio on my intel board.
I could NEVER get line in to work on the realtek stuff. It was always flakey, the drivers first said it wasnt possible due to a design bug, then a year later they updated and line in was there... but it barely functioned right. I use line in because I have 2 workstations next to each other.
So I went and bought an XFI... thinking it would cure all my problems. It did, but it too had driver issues, there was a serious latency issue with audio where it would corrupt audio until you restarted a program... namely ITUNES caused it all the damn time.
I rarely run into the issue now though. But the card has been a very good experience, audio quality is great, very little machine noise bleeds in, where as my onboard audio was so noisy.
I use XBMC and pipe out the DTS to a receiver, the XFI does it all very well.
I'm glad I bought it, although it has its issues and Creative really needs to get their shit together because I may look elsewhere next time for a more supported card that gets more frequent driver updates. But all in all, the chip on the XFI is extremely good, and the card surpasses the onboard in function, audio quality and even driver support...
The main reason to get a discrete card is the noise. Onboard audio always puts out white noise to the speakers, which you really can hear in a quiet environment. My Xonar D2X puts out no noise at all; you can put your ear right to the speaker and hear nothing. This way I can leave the speakers on instead of having to turn them on each time I want to watch a movie and turn them back off again to avoid the damn noise grating on my ears. The card's sound quality is excellent and Linux fully supports it.
I do lots of stuff with DSP, playing with various sorts of digital modulation and demodulation. While the crappiest sound interface can capture everything there is to capture from a communications-quality audio signal, it's handy to have some extra signal-to-noise ratio or sampling rate for particular applications. I've played with PSK31, HF weather fax and weather satellites.
...laura
Never heard of people using one of those "home theater in a box" setups? Or people producing music? Or people dual-purposing a high-end audio setup?
Living With a Nerd
Depends which ones. I have tried making a media center out of nearly anything short of a dead badger. Based on my experience:
Most VIA EPIAs have sound quality on par with discrete audio solutions. It is something you can hook to a proper amp and not be disgusted by what comes out from the other end. Most via based mini-ITXes can proudly play flac encoded audio with proper Hi Fi quality. So are some of the older Crystal Audio chipsets found on really old high end motherboards.
Compared to that most audio on Intel chipset motherboards I have had to deal with is utter tripe (with the notable exemption of Asus). The most common problems are:
1. Interference from the network hardware. As the network works it "ticks" over the audio channel. Makes a PC totally unusable for music. This is more common on older kit, though I still see it here and there even today.
2. IRQ interference problems on new hardware. I thought that shared IRQ problems are something of the distant (circa 1998) past. Recently Fujitsu-Siemens and Intel proved me wrong. The Intel HD on the Scaleo-E needs special IRQ tweaking on Linux in order not to skip: http://foswiki.sigsegv.cx/bin/view/Net/DebianScaleoE
3. Distortion. Most onboard Intel HD audio has notable distortion in the high freq range. Examples - HP 6xxx series laptops, Lenovo S10e.
You get whatever you pay for. Viva le monopoly - result is crap video, crap audio, crap disk IO and the consumer is blaming it all on guess what - the too slow CPU so they are aiming to get a bigger one for Xmas which is in favour of guess who...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Output to my monitor's speakers doesn't even pass through my soundcard... unless it does so prior to sending it to my video card, which then sends it out to my monitor via HDMI.
Then again, I don't use my monitor's speakers unless I want to independently control the volume on it; normally I use my surround system connected to the computer's sound outputs.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've been in the industry for about 25 years. And I can tell. I have a media center set up with about 15 speakers in all. I definitely can tell. I don't disagree with you that sound quality and features are better with an add-in card. I just don't agree that sound quality is that bad with on-board audio.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
It is a lot cheaper though. No extra board, just a couple more inexpensive components for the pick and place machine. The solder, admin overhead, etc comes for free since the board gets that with or without the extra chip. That's especially true with the common technique of making one master board and then lesser boards are just a matter of not actually placing all of the chips.
In more tightly integrated chipsets it costs even less. They don't save much at all leaving part of the die blank. Then it's just a matter of the few analog components.
Most of the time, I use my ATH-AD700s, but when I want to show people a youtube video or if I'm gaming and watching a movie, I'll just use the speakers built into the monitor. My main monitor is an Asus VH236H (secondary is a Dell 2005FPW). I gotta say, considering they are just speakers built into the back of a monitor, the VH236H has some decent built-ins. They are tinny and devoid of bass, just like any built-in speaker on a budget monitor...but I'm constantly surprised by the amount of detail that manages to come through.
Space concerns and volume are the only reasons I do it. Curse you, 3rd floor apartment!
Living With a Nerd
On a budget, you can go with the NuForce uDAC2 that supports 24 bit audio and can output to headphones, RCA, or digital coaxial. I use it for all my audio on the PC and it works great on those laptops where you have little choice on the soundcard. Laptops are the best example of the terrible sound of interference if you plug your headphones direct into the sound card so need the DAC the most. It is also small and portable so easy to switch between devices.
So yes, sometimes.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I tried that on my desktop at home, kinda funny, but the interference got encoded into the TOSlink signal, as at some point it has to travel electrically. I was kind of surprised about this, as I would have thought it would sound good too, but Realtek truly is utter crap.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Several of the graphs show the frequency response of the different sound chips. I reckon it's SUPPOSE to demonstrate a short coming of the integrated Realtek chip because it falls off much sooner than the much more expensive expansion card, but it drops off at 20kHz - approximately the ceiling of human hearing. It's great that your $200+ card can output at 50kHz, but I personally wouldn't pay even $1 extra for the feature.
As an aside, I'd be much more interested in a card that comes as part of a recording suite with some high end MIDI capabilities. If I could get some sort of card + Finale/Pro Tools/Vienna Symphonic Library (not necessarily all together...that'd be ridiculously expensive) that'd be heavenly.
When random adolescents were asked, "Is apathy and ignorance the biggest problem among American teenagers?" the typical response was, "I don't know, and I don't care."
Much like the onboard sound on my system (and I do have a decent set of Klipsch speakers from 8 years ago or so) I really don't give a crap what sound device I'm using. The last time I bought a dedicated sound device, I bought one of those cool Creative external devices for something like $80. It lasted a little over a year before it mysteriously stopped working.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Or save your money and get something decent like a Firewire external audio interface. I have a nice 12 in/out one that does 24-bit 192Khz. Obviously I'm not using that for general purpose stuff. You then have your PC and sound device well apart and isolated.
If you're really serious about using analogue outputs (really, why bother?) and want the best quality then you would be using balanced in/out.
For audio recording, get one with breakout box housing a/d converter externally.
But I also have a few old ensoniq cards without external box that record and play pretty clean signal, and they were pretty cheap back when bought.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
You got the better deal, they cleaned the controller for you.
I don't have $400 speakers plugged in to my TV!
I didn't say $400 speakers, I said setup. There is a very, VERY big difference.
People producing music are not your "average" setup.
You sure about that? You'd be surprised how low-budget you can go and still produce a great-quality sound.
Living With a Nerd
In my experience, the only time it's worth having a discrete sound card is if you have a kick-ass set of headphones (or speaker setup). For the average $100 set of headphones/$400 speaker setup? Totally unecessary. Now, it's worth it if you want "surround" virtualization with headphones, but otherwise, again, totally unecessary.
Of course, if you truly care about sound quality, you'll just use a digital output (either through USB or Optical) and buy a nice external DAC, thereby completely bypassing any potential electrical interference generated from a sound card.
Note: I run an ATH-AD700 off my built-in sound card and I think it sounds great, so no accusations of audiodouchebaggery on my part, please.
Don't forget your gold-plated cables.
Get off my lawn.
Naturally this answer will vary depending on job-type requirements, but in general, if you're playing games or playing back music, the answer is now a pretty cut and dry "No".
For many years integrated sound sucked. I would purposefully look for boards that didn't include it when motherboard shopping (didn't want unused ports on my board). Lately though, integrated sound - and network, has gotten to the point where it's good enough for anyone not wanting to indulge in a specialty/niche action.
Sound cards just kinda peaked - they do what they do and do it well. There's still not much the average person would want to do these days that a Sound Blaster Live won't do - and that card is 12 years old. When the technology is that mature, you have to expect the integrated stuff to catch up.
I'd expect integrated graphics to reach this level within a few years too.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I wonder how complex your algorithms would have to be to determine if the sounds produced are of gunshots or female moans.
They should give the Turing award to anyone that can produce an algorithm that can tell the difference between porn and women's tennis.
I have considerable experience building "media centers" and mythtv boxes.
The 4th common problem I've found is hissy. Low signal to noise ratio by virtue of high white (pink?) noise level.
The 5th common problem I've found is weak outputs. I have a 1st gen mac mini as sort of a MP3 jukebox and it just barely outputs line level on a good day. It's probably running a bit low to my occasional annoyance. So just run everything at a lower level, resulting in problem #4 rearing its ugly head again hisssssssssssss.
The 6th common problem I've found is way funky drivers with creeping featureitis: weird pre-distortion to "expand the stereo experience", equalization that doesn't work as well as a real eq although it clips pretty well, strange attempts at internal DSP to simulate echos. Just turn my bytes into AC voltage and leave it alone, please!
The 7th common problem, admittedly not too often a problem, is ground loops. Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Gimme a transformer isolated input any day. Not so bad with optical digital inputs of course.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My last PC had terrible interference when I used the onboard sound, or so I thought. Everyone's advice was to get a sound card, and guess what? It improved nothing. The problem was the front panel audio ports, not the sound hardware. The back ports on the motherboard sounded just as good as the ports on the pricey sound card.
Since I don't game and I don't record audio, the only advantage the discrete sound card had was louder headphone output, and not even by much.
Hands in my pocket
I'll list some issues...
Seriously. Just spend the extra $50 on a half-decent dedicated card. You'll be glad you did...or you can just wait until you're fed-up with Realtek.
Every on board sound I have ever tried while using headphones I could hear some sort of static noise with every action I made. Wiggle the mouse? acoustic noise happens right along with it, open or close a folder, a different tone of noise. My newest motherboard from about 2007 (Asus Striker extreme) had this problem.
For casual listening? For critical listening before delivering A/V work? For production A/V work? As part of a musical instrument?
There are some mid-priced consumer audio devices that are good enough for most work (e.g., they have output fidelity that is already far beyond the limits of human perception.)
But how is their input fidelity? If the concept of "input" doesn't occur to you, I'm sure it matters very little how good your sound card is. Once you get to a -27dB noise floor, you're probably fine.
A sound card and monitoring environment good enough to stake your reputation as any sort of professional in anything audio related is a completely different scenario. And once you're recording, you can easily draw a bright line between consumer products that are good enough and those that are not.
And yes, there are plenty of applications for consumer-grade devices in what amounts to professional levels of work. Personally I'm satisfied with my Delta 1010 and my pair of Genelecs. I have spent more on room treatment than on these items, but then I'm a semi-professional musician and I consider my sound card and monitors to be an very important part of my musical instrument. I have a friend who spent more on her cello *case* than my current computer cost. *shrug*.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I just use my 'motherboard sound car' :p for the optical out to a receiver. The receiver does all the work so the quality of the onboard is almost totally irrelevant.
On top of that I would bet my bookshelves powered by a receiver from onboard audio sound better than many high end sound card to computer speaker setups.
?
USB and Firewire both hook to real audio interface units well enough, although, if you want to go high end, you might still want to use a PCI interface card.
That is all.
Desktop? Laptop? My understanding is that HDMI (OMFG what are you doing with one of those pieces of crap?) runs through the sound card, then into the video card.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The average person doesn't care because they've never actually heard the difference. With integrated sound you lose general quality, volume, bass, and a whole bunch of other refinements I don't know anything about but can still hear. (Good gravy is EAX awesome.) This is on top of the fact that Realtek tends to be buggy as hell; when I used it, all manner of programs would crash constantly.
The main thing I'd like to know is why this article didn't even consider the OG of sound cards, which until now was still the only one I was even aware was still in the business: Creative. How can you claim to know anything about the state of the industry if you pointedly ignore its 900 lb gorilla? I have an X-Fi and it's awesome.
I can't answer 2 and 4, but as for 1 and 3... my computer is a few years old and has an integrated Realtek ALC888S sound processor. It seems to do environmental effects OK in Source (HL2) based games.
Note: I'm saying this purely from my experience playing Team Fortress 2, as it's the Source game I've played the most... I've noticed that Source has different effects based on the floor and room types. A good example of this would be the echoing in the sewer tunnels below 2fort.
Then again, I don't know if this is specific to the Orange Box 2009 version of the engine or if it affects all Source games (almost all of Valve's games were updated to at least Orange Box 2007 with their Mac releases).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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!
I didn't say $400 speakers, I said setup. There is a very, VERY big difference.
For most of us, our "setup" is the two speakers plugged into our computer, so the setup = speakers in our minds. Needing more to the setup than just speakers is alien to me.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I believe you're thinking of Media Vision. They sold a soundcard with a built-in SCSI port bundled with a 1X CD-ROM drive back in the early nineties.
I tried various cards from Creative and Turtle Beach and always went back to the Media Vision card as being the most trouble-free. It stayed in my computer until ISA slots became unavailable.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Absolutely right, but not only if you intend to record new audio. If you intend to podcast or make music with your computer, whether with MIDI instruments, or by using found sounds or with a microphone and guitar, you'll want to have a discrete audio adapter.
And it can be done very cheaply with professional results. USB audio adapters, with included pre-amps for mics and direct instrument connections, can be had for well under $100. And once you get the audio into the computer, you'll want to be able to hear it loudly and accurately, using the outputs on the adapter. Though many home music producers say it's absolutely necessary to use a pair of high-quality (audio) monitors to mix down the sound, a lot of passable work can be done with a good pair of headphones (though you'll have to make some adjustments to compensate), especially if you're doing electronica or dance music.
I designed the computer music lab at a major university, with a big fat budget, and I've helped students get off the ground with a few hundred bucks (including a midi controller).
Commercial-quality audio production has never been more accessible, and that makes me happy if for no other reason than that it can cut the major record labels out of the chain from idea to finished product.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It sounds like you're talking about the nVidia nForce 2 chipset, which was great, and notable for Soundstorm's real-time Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding.
What about hardware mixing? The bane of Linux users that found out there sound card can't handle more then one program using the output at the same without going through some insane hoops. There been a few sound servers to address this shortcoming.
Seems nowadays quite many of the pro(sumer) sound cards are external ones connected via USB.
Presumably the idea being to isolate the DAC from all the electrical noise inside the case?
What about latency on these things? One would imagine that one extra protocol hop would add latency, and then traffic would have to be shared with other traffic on the same bus? I mean, people doing audio production seem to be sensitive to latency, to the point that Linux users use the RT kernel. Is USB really up to it?
Most people I know, including many gamers, aren't using expensive headphones in a quiet environment.
Most are using either cheap headphones, or cheap speakers. Yes, some have higher-end speakers, but not a majority by far. No classical music, no country music, no jazz, no bluegrass, no .... you get the point. They picked a bunch of rock/alternative tracks. They didn't even do blind listening tests for games, movies, or anything other than rock/alternative music.
Oh well. At least the testers were a variety of "audiophile"-ness.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I can see where a distinct sound card would be useful in a media center. I can't for the life of me get the stupid onboard audio working in 5.1 mode on my current board with Windows 7, even though it's supposed to be supported. I'm thinking of just shutting it down in bios and trying again with a discrete card. Oblig. Ask Slashdot: Any suggestions?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I have two ~£120 speakers and a ~£120 amplifier attached to my "pee cee". The DVD player and a 3.5mm audio jack (for phones/MP3 players) are also connected.
The difference between the on-board sound card (Intel something-or-other) and the PCI card (SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS, about £60 IIRC) is clear. It's also better than my flatmate's Macbook (which I assume isn't set up correctly, it's so awful).
My friend and I were just talking about this last night. He had just reinstalled XP because he couldn't get his Audigy to work in Win7. I also have not been able to get either of my perfectly working older Sound Blaster Live cards to work under Win7. It appears Creative isn't going to release any new drivers and would rather you go spend $100-$200 on a new card when yours already work perfectly fine.
I know the audio I'm getting from my mobo isn't as good as it could be. I also preferred the fine controls I had with my Soundblaster cards. But I will live with the onboard versus going to buy a new card when the ones I have are perfectly fine.
You're nothing; like me.
Desktop.
It's the only digital input on this monitor. Its inputs are literally 1xHDMI, 1xVGA, and 1xStereo sound.
Except that my old video card (a nVidia 8600GT with HDMI out) didn't output sound to HDMI. It wasn't until I upgraded to a nVidia GT 240 that I can now output sound to the monitor.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You kids and your newfangled toys! Be grateful!
I remember hooking up my first 8-bit Pro AudioSpectrum card (with SCSI) and my original CD-ROM drive. That's 1X for you spoiled brats. I had a CD-ROM drive before they started marking them with speed multipliers!
My 386 was the envy of all the kids in my neighborhood... especially after I maxed it out with 6MB of RAM. They marveled at the speed that Windows 3.1 loaded, and were astonished at the cutting-edge video with AUDIO when Wing Commander III came out.
Good times, they were...
They should give the Turing award to anyone that can produce an algorithm that can tell the difference between porn and women's tennis.
You mean women's tennis isn't porn?
oh, come on. The difference between really crappy cables and gold-plated ones is likely to be inaudible in a blind test. You'd have to be deaf to miss the improvement from decent speakers/phones over the crappy PC ones.
I have to wonder about this. At first I thought "well, maybe people who prefer discrete cars are incredible audiophiles who hear minute details I cannot appreciate." However, I've never had an integrated card where I couldn't turn it up far louder than it needed to go.
you can't afford it. AD/DA conversion should happen in its own box, away from the mother board. An audio card that slots into the motherboard is just as bad as an audio processor with AD/DAs built into the motherboard. Both are going to make a lot of noise. In this case, the difference between $30 and $230 is negligible.
While those kind of people do exist (and thanks for the laugh), the GP is not one of them. He said he could tell the difference--but wanted to reiterate TFA's statement that on-board audio is passable even though it is bested by a low-cost upgrade.
I have this mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131274
This is a decently high end motherboard for when it was released, but it comes with a Realtek style onboard sound with a breakout board that plus into a special slot. I had to cease using it, the 60 cycle hum was so bad that you could barely hear the audio over it. This is what happens with the majority of these onboard cards, unless you have decent speakers hooked to it, you probably wouldn't be able to tell, but hook up some headphones, or even a cheap set of speakers with an actual amp, and you will be able to tell the difference. I am not an audiophile, I have worked in the sound industry, but will be the first to admit that my hearing isn't great anymore. Try it for yourself, go buy a discrete sound card at your favorite big box and try it out, if you don't think it makes a difference, it is possible that you have a decent onboard sound card, they are rare, but they happen. No loss if you want to return the card, but don't slam others because you haven't tried, it takes no audiophile to hear the difference.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
No, Creative Labs made a Soundblaster 16 with a SCSI2 port.
If you want digital surround sound for a HTPC, you want Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect to transcode into DD/DTS bitstream into your HT receiver.
AFAIK there are currently ZERO onboard sound chips that do this.
Yes, you could run 6 cables from the back of the HTPC into the analog preamp ins on your receiver (assuming it isn't a skinny modern HTPC-in-a-box that only has SPDIF or HDMI in) but you'd likely also end up with hum and other strange sound artifacts from the chintzy DAC..
These days, I'd _REALLY_ prefer a dump of 5.1 LPCM over HDMI, and it's technically probably easier to do to boot, or at least less license-y..
And with a 255.1 system you grow more ears?
You can process the signal that's going to the headphones so that it sounds like surround, after all, headphones have a speaker for each ear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Headphone
I used to agree, but then I got a motherboard with really crappy onboard audio. I'd previously been using the on-board audio in a machine that also had a SoundBlaster Live because the quality was about the same but the drivers for the SB Live caused a crash about once a week (Windows and Linux with the Creative ones. The FreeBSD drivers were stable, but didn't support more than two channels back then).
The motherboard that I then got had terrible on-board audio. Anything above about 70% volume caused a lot of clipping and sounded horrible. No idea why, but even a cheap ad-on card was an improvement.
The biggest difference in sound quality that I've between cards for playback[1] was with an external USB one. Moving the DAC outside the case so the analogue parts are not in a noisy EM environment makes much more of a difference than any improvements over the quality of the components.
[1] If you're doing effects on the card, it definitely does make a difference. The cheaper on-board cards did everything in 16-bit, so you got audible clipping from the artefacts. The better ones used 24- or 32-bit values for intermediate results.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Subtitles! Porn with subtitles on is the only way to watch. Not only will you know the plot, but you'll learn to recognise "high pitch moan", "soft moan" "moans increase in volume" etc. Just need them to start putting the subtitling at the top of the screen instead of the bottom. Now if only they also had porn come in Described Video, preferably by Betty White
Sounds like a driver issue. If the hardware can't handle the mixing, it should be done in software. A modern CPU will use a tiny fraction of its power mixing a dozen or so audio streams.
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I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, but I seem to recall that my brother had a CD-ROM drive that was labeled "single spin" which I assume is what we later referred to as 1x.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
They reveal the authors insistence on going into excruciating detail on everything. Maybe his attention to detail makes him a better audio engineer/evaluator, but honestly we would have been fine with "The subjects preferred X card for Y music by a substantial margin"...
In my opinion, showing one's work is a way to deflect claims that advertisers inappropriately influenced the review's conclusion.
Actually, I just had a reason to check sound card prices this morning, because I had a client call who wants their sound problem fixed on their PC. Seems someone yanked a pair of headphones out of the front audio jack suddenly and accidentally, damaging the jack itself. Now the PC only makes nasty buzzing sounds, if anything, when you plug any speakers or headphones into it. Since it uses integrated audio, my plan was to disable the on-board sound in the BIOS and just add a sound card to use instead.
It appears you can buy a Creative Labs branded card for around $30 these days from many sources online, so they're not premium priced like they once were.
And while I agree they loaded a bunch of "bloatware" with their installation discs, I suppose the biggest benefit to buying a Creative card today is the support. With a lot of these other cards, they just use various Crystal Semiconductor chipsets on a generic board design, and they can be a huge pain to get updated drivers for, if anything newer than whatever your version of Windows auto-detects/installs is ever released.
Just get a USB or Firewire audio interface for recording audio. Many of them have better quality than internal cards anyway. There's absolutely no need to get a card.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
BTW, in my experience going with any onboard sound card is not the best way to go these days. I used to use lots of different high end sound cards, but now that new high end DACs (digital analog converter) actually have USB input, the best way to get sound out of a computer/digital device is the same way you get it off a high end turntable or CD transport - go from source to DAC, then convert it. The device drivers that allow you to treat an attached USB device as a digital audio device are very good, available for all platforms, and quite simple.
So forget the sound card completely (and definitely dont use the onboard sound), go with a DAC that has USB and you will be amazed. Can also pick and choose a DAC that suits your requirements and pricepoint without messing about with your system config ... Like i said, this is a huge deal for folks who like to use computer based audio sources. Least it has been for me ...
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Don't you just hate it when your sound card blabs to everyone about what sounds you've been listening to? Discretion is THE most important trait I look for in a sound card!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Not only that, but he comes _on_ her, instead of _in_ her. Just like everyone does when they have sex. How anybody ever winds up pregnant is beyond me...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The music gives it away.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Now if only they also had porn come in Described Video, preferably by Betty White. Dude, don't make in invoke Rule 34!
By the way, just to be clear, did you want Betty White doing the acting, or Betty White doing the voice-over? 'Cause I'm pretty sure either way would be fucking hilarious!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've been claiming this since I bought a PowerPC Mac about 15 years ago. The onboard audio from old Apple hardware was great (not so sure about the current iMacs, since they are "consumer grade" by definition).
I haven't purchased a sound card(except for the one PC I built from scratch) since, well, ever. With a modern higher end computer, you should expect the on-board audio to be sufficient for 99% of the market (with the pro-audio crowd needing something better).
We are actually using the onboard audio from our Dell towers at work instead of the 5 year old SoundBlaster Audigy soudn card we bought because the onboard performs more reliably and with no perceivable quality loss.
Creative cards are best for gaming because they support EAX (if the game has it).
Also they are (were) great for MIDI music creation as they supported soundfonts in hardware mode (sadly, in Win7 this no longer seems to be true). When it came to jamming with MIDI files, a plain low-end Soundblaster Live could kick ass compared to a lot of other-brand soundcards that cost 3-4X as much.
Audiophile cards are best for music playback, but often lack any features to modify the sound at all (no bass/treble control, not even software volume control). Also they may have no MIDI, or a really poor-sounding MIDI table built-in.
I had a PC with a Soundblaster Audigy and an Audiphile 2496 in it last time around.
The Creative was best for gaming, easily.
The M-Audio had the cleanest signals in and out, easily. The onboard sound didn't come close to what either of the cards could do, at what they were best....
~
And that is why, at a recent AES conference there was a great little speech given about how Audio is the only industry that eats its young. If it doesn't matter to the average consumer how it sounds, than we will progressively get worse and worse quality audio considered passable. It's sad enough that people are preferring the sound of MP3s and most have never heard music on anything better than crappy cheap earbuds or, at best, a poorly configured home theater system, yet they claim to love their music.
If I had a nickel for every time I've sat someone down in front of a decent quality sound system (think $500 system, counting receiver and speakers or receiver and headphones) and played them an album that they, "know inside and out" and they find something new that they've heard before, I would be able to afford the amazing speakers that a friend works with. Let's be honest, as long as people consider iTunes 128 kbps AAC to be, "High Quality" and 256 kbps AAC to be, "Highest Quality" with 128 MP3 being acceptable, it doesn't matter how expensive your soundcard is, it won't sound good.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
...and how is it routed? Digital or Analog? Running to a receiver? Because if it's digital, running to a receiver you have ignored the point of TFA (and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment). If you're running analog out of the card, well, then I can put up a decent argument against what you're claiming.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I would like to have a video card with an HDMI output that also puts sound through that HDMI connection. Either by means of an audio in or by emulating a second card to the board to work with existing audio and video drivers. And I want a Linux driver that supports the card(s).
Had that at work once. Discovered it about ten minutes before a big presentation to over a hundred people was due, and I had to bodge up a way to fix it using whatever I could get at such short notice. I ended up going Laptop -> 3.5mm-jack-to-phono cable -> audio isolation transformer for microphones with XLR input, running in reverse -> XLR-to-6.5mm-jack -> Amplifier input. It worked! Mono only, but that's all we needed.
No way, I am the type of person that says the $8.00 HDMI is as good as the $120 HDMI from Monster--because it is (www.3dguru.com). I'm the guy that says that the coat hanger sounds as good as the Monster audio cables. I am saying that the on-board sound is good enough for my audio system.
Don't buy from Monster!!!!
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Sorry, it's www.guru3d.com
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I like expensive cables, but only when they are at least 72" inches long.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
You're the same kind of person who swears by the $700 dollar speaker cables, then in a blind test thinks the coathanger sounds the best.
No, he'd be the type of person who has the $700 cables, but acknowledges that a coathanger works too. Which is much more reasonable than the monster cable people you're referring to.
You're missing the point. With the HDMI cables, there is no actual difference that you can perceive. However, with sound cards, there is a great difference. I can't stand the sound on my laptop but my desktop's sound card has much better sound. The companies that make high-quality sound cards aren't just making a cheap cable and marking it up 10x, they are actually making a product with a difference.
That's easy. If the balls are clapping it's porn.
I don't know if cable material matters at all. What matters though, is the shielding. Believe it or not, it happened once that my Creative speakers acted as an antenna-receiver for some kind of radio signal (a dialogue of between two persons of which only one man could be heard), which could be heard faintly in the speakers even when the amplifier was turned down to zero. With better cables this may have been prevented.
You've been able to get ~$30 junk cards from Creative for /years/. Used to be stuff like the SB16 PCI, now it's that old Audigy.
You'd get better results from the cheaper Asus card mentioned in TFA, and the price is the same. Drivers are, as usual, provided by Asus and are occasionally updated - I'm running a Xonar DX and have been mostly pleased with it; the only thing I can honestly complain about is that Fallout 3 crashes more often when I've got the EAX 5.0 emulation enabled.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Maybe on some devices? But on my laptop, the HDMI audio out appears as a dedicated sound device. Effectively I have two sound cards. Sometimes I have to disable the actual sound device in order to make the HDMI become the consistant default.
Yes, but what about silence quality? The onboard sound options I've tried over the last few years have all suffered from appalling noise levels. Installing even a basic but quiet sound card can make a big improvement in overall sound quality.
game forums are littered with comments about Realtek cards crashing games. I've got sound accelleration turned to 'Basic' in dxdiag to work around most of it, but I lose a lot of cool effects. I'm still too cheap to spring for an extra soundcard, but yeah, Realteks are unstable as heck...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My first CDROM was SCSI.... Terminate dammit!
I know someone who used to be a senior audio guy at Microsoft. While he was there, he tried to get improved standards for motherboard audio: for example, he wanted the signal-to-noise ratio to be similar to what you can get on a $20 portable music player. For a while, the "Designed for Windows" sticker required basic quality from the onboard audio. There was fierce pushback from some big names in industry (I won't name names unless he tells me it's okay to do so) and in the end, Microsoft relented. Margins are thin in the PC business, and they insisted on the right to use cheap (i.e., lousy) audio components.
I am not at all surprised that you can make a big improvement by spending $30 on a sound card. At work, we don't use motherboard audio at all; we usually use USB or FireWire audio devices. (I do sometimes use the built-in audio on a Mac laptop. Apple seems to have spent the extra five cents or whatever it is, and used decent audio parts.)
For $30 or less, you can get a USB audio device that will give you nice clean stereo. I have been buying the Turtle Beach Audio Advantage; they changed the design since I bought one but I'll bet the quality is still fine.
For multichannel playback, you can get a $100 device made by ESI called the GigaPort HD. The audio quality is fine, but the drivers sometimes have issues. For $400 to $500 you can get an Edirol UA-101 (or maybe it's branded as a "Cakewalk" UA-101); that has 10 channels in and 10 channels out (8 analog and an optical S/PDIF).
By the way, for headphones, I really like the Sennheiser HD555 headphones that were mentioned in TFA. Lightweight, comfortable, excellent quality, and very reasonably priced (under $90 on Amazon last I checked).
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
onboard share resources with the rest of the system while dedicated cards tend to have their own memory and processors. I've also had lots of problems with onboard cards and interference/feedback/hum/etc
Hmmm.... remember those old television shows where the narrator was physically present in the shot, while the action froze?
Yeah, Betty White sitting on a chair right beside the action, narrating over a cup of tea...I could watch that.
Can you please elaborate on why you have 15 speakers? Are they all in one normal-sized room, or is it theater-sized? Scattered through a house?
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
It's been at least 10 yrs since any consumer audio output processing has taxed any contemporary CPUs.
When you start recording you will need better latency. Not for the playback, but for the recording. I have yet to see onboard audio with acceptable latency for recording and realtime (!) monitoring. Having said that: for your mp3's and games, for heavens sake, keep your money in the pocket!
"Horrible"? No.
"Less Good"? Likely.
"Is a discrete card worth the money?" Depends on what you want and what you have to spend.
Many people can't tell the difference without specific sound comparisons. Some still can't tell the difference.
Many people don't think the monetary investment $20-$200 is worth the gains in sound and performance (off-loading work from an already burdened system, for example).
I used to use a Soundblaster Live Value! and then Audigy with my system. The Audigy made it through 2 motherboard upgrades. When I got a new prefab system on a deal. My intent with the system is to make a low-wattage gaming machine, so in my experimentation, I decided to see if I could notice any significant performance and sound quality difference with the new system's onboard sound. I didn't hear/see enough to make me re-open the case.
The Audigy stayed with my older power-hog of a rig when I handed it down to the GF.
USB has much higher cpu power use then any pci or on board sound card.
What about on board sound over TOSlink?
I'm sure you're right and I probably don't have the best solution but it's effectively free and good enough. I rather put my money towards visuals.
The Lynx Two is one of the lowest noise, highest dynamic range cards on the market and it is an internal solution. Despite being in the PC, and of course entirely powered by it, the noise is almost non existent.
Heh... of course when the on-board sound card simply *doesn't work* with something (I'm thinking Second Life Voice under Linux, which granted is a huge mess because of the way it's put together), and it does with an add-on card or USB card, then, yeah, I can sure as heck tell a difference! I haven't needed expensive cards for the add-on, just something that doesn't use the Intel chipset.
Because they make the only hardware accelerated consumer soundcards out there. Now does that matter? Well it depends on what you do. If you don't play games then no it doesn't. If you do it depends on the game. Some games do not use hardware sound features at all, period. The Source Engine games are like this. Everything is done in software, all cards are equal otherwise. Other games can use hardware if available, but will fall back to software otherwise and have pretty much the same features. WoW is like this. It can use hardware, but it doesn't really change the quality much, just maybe gives a tiny performance boost. Still others only perform well with hardware. Mass Effect 1 is like this. With a hardware OpenAL soundcard, you get full 5.1 sound with all sorts of effects like occlusion, reverberation, etc. Without one, you get simple stereo sound.
So sure, some people still want that because they play games that makes use of it and nobody else supports it. To the extent you find any support at all from other cards it is software emulation and has bugs. Only Creative does it in hardware and fully supports OpenAL and EAX (which is because those are Creative standards).
I use a media center. A budget one. We don't need IMAX@Home. We're those people that don't see the value of HD. =P
Acer Aspire X1300-U1801A (onboard sound, onboard video) -- $250
Dell M109S SVGA (858 x 600) DLP projector -- ~$200
2.0 Speakers
Some $75 projector screen
I set the PC under the coffee table, the projector on the coffee table on a small platform, and the screen ~7' away. It's effectively 40+ inches diagonal. The projection is dimmed by natural light, so if we want extra detail/contrast, we close the curtains.
It's cheap. It's networked. It's earthquake safe. It's easily stored/transported.
One reason is simply quality. The built in soundcards are fine, but they are optimized for cost, not quality. I had that problem at work. Figured I'd use the built in soundcard since I wasn't doing anything really critical. However it had an audible hiss with my headphones plugged in. It couldn't handle the low impedance load well, and an audible hiss was the result. Really annoying.
Another can be compatibility issues. Sometimes internal cards fall over on certain things for whatever reason. I again had this problem at work with a newer system. The quality was acceptable, but it kept skipping, dropping audio, and so on in certain circumstances. Had to do with using pro software that talked to it via kernel streaming. It supported that (all WDM soundcards do by definition) but had problems. Getting another card fixed the issue.
Yet another is features. Perhaps you want outputs not supported by your card. Most internal soundcards don't do Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive meaning only 2.0 sound out via S/PDIF. Well maybe you want to do 5.1 digitally to your receiver (since most receivers don't do any advanced processing on analogue signals). So you get a card that does support it.
Games would be still another reason. There are a lot of games out there that use hardware sound acceleration if available, and some that demand it. While that means confining yourself to cards with Creative Labs processors (cards from Creative or Auzentech) lots of people go for that. In some cases it is just a minor speed increase and not really worth it, in others the game demands hardware to give you good quality sound.
So while it is far from universal, it isn't all that uncommon either.
Of course, if you truly care about sound quality, you'll just use a digital output (either through USB or Optical) and buy a nice external DAC, thereby completely bypassing any potential electrical interference generated from a sound card.
For value for money, the Behringer UCA202 is great (about $25): http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx
A big step up is the Cambridge Audio DacMagic: http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/summary.php?PID=320 ($400 or so).
Fantastic sound if you have a decent amp + speakers.
fatalities were bad. anything that came after the x-treme music, was bad. i kinda remember they changed something with the chip production or someting back then, or their contractor. x-treme musics were not being produced, they were hard to find, everyone was looking for them online and offline.
Read radical news here
"Less Good"
Otherwise known in English as "worse"
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I disagree.
We need separate sound cards because motherboard vendors write TERRIBLE drivers for their sound cards.
No, baby, it's not about the length - it's about how you plug it in.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
S/PDIF output to a decent amp from either a good old Chaintech AV710 or a Turtle Beach USB. all problems ever, solved, I'll take my consulting fee now, thanks.
(bit hard to buy the AV710s these days, sadly. fortunately for me, I have a stockpile.)
Meh, I have half decent onboard audio; I say half decent because if I amp it up too much I can hear the noise.
I don't really care, however, because I have an external 5.1 amplifier. If I keep my output low I don't hear any noise and can amp it up my surround system to the point where it's offensive to my neighbours and harmful to my ears and still have clean sound.
If I used headphones more often I might care more about the noise levels though.
The main thing that I found interesting about this article, however, is that the cheap sound card had a flatter frequency response. I think I'll consider purchasing a card simply for that!
Nick
For the average $100 set of headphones/$400 speaker setup?
Thanks for the lesson in statistics to remind us all that "average" is a useless metric with sufficiently outlying outliers.
In what operating system and sound system?
I've had this problem consistently with Linux and ALSA and integrated audio. The problem never occurs on the same hardware with Mac OS X or Windows.
Anything above about 70% volume caused a lot of clipping and sounded horrible. No idea why, but even a cheap ad-on card was an improvement.
Go alsamixer -c 0 to see your sound card settings, it will give the volume in db for each channel. Have a look at the master channel and you will notice for most cards it hits 0db at about 74 percent or so. 100% is +12db, anything with a positive value results in nasty clipping. I imagine it is the same situation on windows but a bit harder to tell.
[1] If you're doing effects on the card, it definitely does make a difference. The cheaper on-board cards did everything in 16-bit, so you got audible clipping from the artefacts. The better ones used 24- or 32-bit values for intermediate results.
Even if you are doing actual audio work the only real reason to get a sound card is lower noise levels. In so far as the quality of the samples decent sound servers like jack do all their processing as 32-bit floats.
Main use of this is errors don't become so cumulative. At the end when it is rendered at 16-bit for cd use it will sound better than if you'd used 16-bit for the whole process.
In modern times relying on the sound card for mixing/effects/midi is just stupid, we have quad/oct core machines that have far lower latency doing it in software and more flexibility. We only need the sound card to essentially act as a dac now.
>Actually, the built in sound cards are pretty decent, for virtually everything
Line recording? Mutli-channel recording? Surround encoding? How are the preamps for mic recording?
Do they have sample-accurate digital transfer? In both directions? How does the 1/8" jack work out over a few months of location gigs? How clean is the output when connecting to a club or theatrical sound system?
For some users, "virtually everything" also means "almost nothing."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Any decent external DAC will run over Firewire which has minimal CPU overhead. These are usually made for recording, maybe a bit overkill for gaming. That being said, there is a huge difference between my Focusrite and the onboard sound. 24bit 192khz ftw (though in all honesty I can't hear a difference over 96khz)
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
More expensive things are always better
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
It's actually quite easy to perceive the difference between quality HDMI cabling and the cheaply-made stuff. However it only shows up when the run is longer. When all you need is a cable to connect devices a few feet from each other, any crappy cable will do. When you need to run more than 50 or so feet of cabling, quality cables will improve the timeliness of the signal and reduce the amount of data that arrives after its usefulness (the signal may be digital, but it's still real-time and very small delays in signal transmission will result in visible artifacts.) Beyond 100 feet, I've been told you really need to transition to fiber optic for the bulk of the run.
So it entirely depends on the context. An expensive monster 6ft cable is, as you've pointed out, a bad joke. An expensive 50ft cable is often very useful.
I clicked on the blind listening test link expecting to see some statistics, but instead we just got a bunch of opinions that may or may not mean anything. (And some admission of non-blindness in the case of detectable hiss, meaning they listened to the cards before starting the blind test.)
You can't do a blind listening test without taking down some numbers and comparing them to the probability of 50%. If the results are more significantly likely than chance, you can't conclude anything.
Frankly, I'm disappointed, since this could have been the most useful part of the discussion.
The only possibility of better quality sound might be USB devices, because the signal is purely digital until converted in the external box - or some kind of digital wireless technology that completely separates the PC from the DAC and amp without introducing noise or lost bits. I challenge anyone to find an internal sound card that provides the quality they are looking for, because it doesn't exist. Every consumer sound card on the market up-samples, so it is reprocessing the sound internally before pushing it out, and this is creating noise. Some professional equipment MIGHT not do this, but you can't always rely on their spec page to tell you about this specific feature(I know, I've bought a midiman sound card). This internal processing is the reason I've gone as far as pushing out S/PDIF do an external $300 DAC, and still got background noise. If the analog conversion is happening in a noisy environment, then that's as good as it'll get. You either learn to put up with it, or start going for really specialized setups.
You mean like in Saved By the Bell where Zack Morris would do a freeze frame to explain stuff? I guess whatever you like since you already want Betty White in there. Please, for the love of God, make sure it is a time when the volume is down (maybe if you are unsure, the article is for you so you can upgrade your sound card). If I was your neighbor, I would never want to hear that coming from your apartment
The world is how you make it
Hey, let's be fair...
Some discrete card vendors write TERRIBLE drivers for their Sound(...Blaster...) cards...
Gold plated cables are not good for sound quality, they're good on the road though because they don't corrode.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
With all due respect, if you aren't pushing the $100 headphone bracket or the studio monitor bracket more like $400 each, you're not in a category that can reasonably make the kind of value judgment regarding audio quality that's under discussion here. Basically you're below a threshold where the transducers and probably the room itself are far more important factors in sound quality than the sound output device (and we're ONLY considering INPUT here, correct?)
Consumer audio devices above the threshold where they have bad noise problems (and many of them DO have really serious noise problems), have fidelity beyond the threshold of human perception. That makes relative value judgments among them pretty much meaningless. Which means, in context, TFA is absolutely correct. Consumer cards on the digital 2-channel output have exactly the same fidelity as any professional device on an internally-clocked digital output. Exactly the same, meaning there is provably no room for improvement.
DACs are not all equal though, not by a long shot, and the average person can easily discriminate them in an A/B/X test, as long as the source material, the output device, and the listening environment permit this kind of judgment in the first place.
Do not underestimate the importance of the room itself in this scenario. In a good enough room (and I don't mean it has to be the fscking mastering control room at Sterling Sound!), a mundane system can sound *excellent*. With just a little bit of treatment (bass traps in the most reflective spots) the average living room can be seriously improved. Or you can put a breathtakingly expensive, pro studio rig in a bad environment and end up with unimpressive results.
If you're recording at all (and I don't just mean with professional recording expectations), the situation with consumer sound cards changes dramatically, and the low end of the products targeted at the pro market start to look (well, sound) very, very good.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Well, I figured my joke might be too opaque. I was riffing on "$700 dollar" and had to use some repeated units with symbols and words. Inches or feet seemed the most relevant. Thus, '72" inches'.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
feed an analog source directly off of a PC. Not a true audiophile anyways. The reality is any integrated PC sound card with integrated optical out (S/PDIF Over TOSLINK) is fine for the job. Why? Because a true audiophile is going to keep digital digital until it hits the pre-amp. While it is true that one card may out perform the other in the D to A conversion most people are going to notice more out of a decent pair of speakers than any money spent on a new card. On the other hand the audiophiles are going to be running a TOSLINK to the back of the pre-amp and than out from there on XLR cables to the amps. Generally amps that are kept as close as possible to the speakers as well.
A PC sound card outputting to a pair of headphones is a crap thing to test. The common 3.5mm headphone cables are utterly terrible at noise rejection (don't you love when you can hear your cellphone receiving a text?). They also run across a lost of noisy crap to get your ears (power-supply, monitor, and numerous other devices).
The key to true audio quality is to keep it digital as long as possible, and make as much of the analog runs as possible balanced.
The sad thing is that this kind of crap is endemic to the audio market as a whole. Audio is for the most part simple physics.
Under the right conditions, coat hangers can introduce clearly audible distortion. Coat hangers usually have a high iron content. The iron enhances the magnetic field inherent in any current flow, but if there's too much current flow, the iron saturates. Bingo, distortion.
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I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Word.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
-Possum Lodge Motto
I don't get why so many people like Betty White. But then again, I don't understand Steven Wright's allure either, so...
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There's a psychoacoustic model that is *very* convincing. Thanks to our evolution as hunters and/or prey animals we have evolved a sensitivity to variations in the time, frequency, and dynamic domains that we interpret as "location." The effect is really pretty amazing, especially when it is combined with visual cues to reinforce the illusion.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I *like* my gold-plated cables. I can use them in high-humidity environments and they don't corrode.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you are in the really cheap seats, you should probably spend whatever audio money you have on speakers or headphones that don't utterly suck.
No, I have to disagree on this excessively general prescription (even though you did stick the "probably" in there). I've heard on-board audio that was so bad that clearly it was more important to replace the audio output than to upgrade the headphones or speakers. I had a ThinkPad once whose output was very hissy and had interference from other components in the system, and it was all clearly audible with crappy headphones.
Basically, the most general prescription that can be made is to identify the weak link and upgrade that first. If you hear hiss or interference, get a reasonable sound card. It doesn't have to be fancy; it just has to be competent.
Are you adequate?
Most onboard cards don't do dolby digital live. If you want discrete 5.1 sound in your games through a real amp via optical or digital coax, you going to need DDL.
You're thinking of womens' beach volleyball
Which is why pro audio equipment using iron core transformers can sound so damn good when the i/o stages are driven to saturation. I dare say that using coathangers in place of bell wire to connect passive speakers would grately improve the sound of most of todays sterile sounding music. Not as much as muting it or turing it off, but it's a good start.
Good speakers aren't cheap. Using several of cheap speakers at once might have a good sound, but good speakers aren't cheap.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I've never had a pair of cables corrode, any that matter.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Yes if you want high end quality (recording studio), hardware features (EAX for games and not software emulation), etc. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS for games. I don't think I will get another SB card since future EAX seems to be dimming or already gone especially under Vista and Windows 7.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Virtualized surround. Works quite well.
Digital/computer stuff has gotten quite cheap, but decent quality MIDI controllers - i.e., mechanical interface - remains bit pricey, even with Chinese manufacturing, especially for student budget.
Of course, compared to before, you can set up pro quality recording setup for fraction.
Which uni did you work with?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
After getting a nice pair of Sennheiser headphones I was very disappointed in the sound quality of both my old Audigy 2 ZS and the on-board sound. There was a noticeable, high-pitched buzz all the time that was very annoying.
Purchased a HT Omega Striker and it sounds MUCH better. Not just no buzz but it just sounded better overall, particularly with the headphones. Quite a difference.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
So, you learn to identify something that's known to be fake? It's a pretty good bet that if your girlfriend sounds like a woman in a porn vid that she's faking it.
Generally in porn, the racket gets held in other ways, if you catch my drift. Also, you usually don't get an odd number of balls.
If you want Sound Blaster Compatibility, the integrated sound doesn't have it.
Coathangers do just fine on their own. But for the same reason that CAT6 requires more insulation, that coathanger won't necessary do if you run a lot of cables in close proximity.
With that in mind 128 kbps IS perfectly acceptable--even with flac, I CAN'T turn it up loud enough to hear ANYTHING distinctly, so there's no sense in wasting disk space on quality I'll never hear.
I don't enjoy my musical predicament nor think it's a good way to "listen" to music, but it's where I'm at right now and I'm guessing it's not particularly uncommon.
Coat hangers usually have a high iron content. The iron enhances the magnetic field inherent in any current flow, but if there's too much current flow, the iron saturates.
Related. Fig. 14 gets somewhat close to a coathanger.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Maybe you just got a bad board or one that used cheaper caps? I can tell the difference between the "gamer" boards and the business class because of the sound. The business boards are actually pretty damned quiet while the gamer boards at least in my exp have been more noisy, probably because they figure you'll go with a card. My ECS business class with solid caps is as quiet as a church mouse and I've often turned off the receiver thinking I needed to turn it on simply because there wasn't any sound at all.
So maybe you just got a bad one? I have noticed building PCs that sound quality (among other things) vary pretty wildly between companies and even models, which is why I would have liked them to have a larger amount of boards tested. After all you can pretty much say ALL onboard sound sucks if you are comparing a shitty Dell desktop or crapola Compaq laptop. That is why I pretty much stick with business class for all my builds. you may not get crossfire/SLI, but the quality of the board caps and traces IMHO makes up for that. Well that and I find the business class boards tend to last longer.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually the "Fatal1ty" series were good, since they came with the actual EMU20K1/2 DSP. The X-Fi XtremeMusic and Xtreme Audio were rebranded/tweaked SB Live! chipsets and thus lacked the capabilities of the rest of the X-Fi line.
Sigs are for losers
I just have a LCD monitor that has a line output that can take the signal from my HDMI video card, it ouputs the digital signal across my sound card and it doesn't get DAC converted until it hits my monitor. Clear and crisp and a whole lot better.
And I don't even NEED a sound card as it is done through HDMI.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The 4th common problem I've found is hissy. Low signal to noise ratio by virtue of high white (pink?) noise level.
And that one too, though in a lot of cases it can be traced to the power supply. That is one of the reasons why the MiniITX systems tend to behave better - most of their cases have the low freq AC portion out of the case in a separate dead rat. In a lot of cases it is actually not the PC fault. There was a long period between mid-90-es and mid-2000es when the manufacturers did not give a damn about the AUX input on most kit. On a lot of cheap kit from those days you get passable CD playback and surprisingly hissy and crappy AUX. This cannot be helped :(
The 5th common problem I've found is weak outputs. I have a 1st gen mac mini as sort of a MP3 jukebox and it just barely outputs line level on a good day. It's probably running a bit low to my occasional annoyance. So just run everything at a lower level, resulting in problem #4 rearing its ugly head again hisssssssssssss.
I am typing this on one of those and I am surprised that you get it to produce tolerable audio in the first place (unless you left it with OSX). My experience with that one is that it skips. It is supposedly fixed in the latest ALSA drivers though.
The 6th common problem I've found is way funky drivers with creeping featureitis: weird pre-distortion to "expand the stereo experience", equalization that doesn't work as well as a real eq although it clips pretty well, strange attempts at internal DSP to simulate echos. Just turn my bytes into AC voltage and leave it alone, please!
Most of these can be disabled from a decent mixer even if they are implemented in hardware. The bloody Fuji-Siemens Scaleo and other Intel HD systems are an example at hand here as it has all kinds of unwanted effects you have to put to 0 to get decent sound.
The 7th common problem, admittedly not too often a problem, is ground loops. Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Gimme a transformer isolated input any day. Not so bad with optical digital inputs of course.
Aaa.. that one. Now that is a very interesting one. If you perform surgery on the stereo connector on a lot of these you can find that the imbecile designing it has used a 4 contact connector they can do "easy" headphone detection and report headphones presense in software (instead of doing this based on current). That can often be helped by using a 4 contact connector similar to the one used by Nokia for their universal cable (audio+video) instead of 3 (left, right, ground) and doing some soldering of your own. It is of course unnecessary if it is implemented correctly (HP NC4000 is a good example).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
UGH try running early Linux or FreeBSD to recognize that controller on that proprietary sound card.
http://saveie6.com/
Mmx came out with the pentium 133 mhz and this was a BIG DEAL.The previous posters did not have sse or mmx 1 or 2 with their CPUs. Intel saw mp3s back in 96 and put some of the long 2 bit media streams and added hardware acceleration. This would explain part of the low cpu utilization. Also you could of had hardware sound cards. Today they are software based so I do not know how a good sound card would help. I will read the article tomorrow. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are software only (as far as I know).
Many mp3s were encoded with only 2 channels and 16hz which were a lot less
http://saveie6.com/
Are you confusing Audio Data Compression with Dynamic Range Compression? They're completely different things. Also, turning things up create a fake belief that they sound better, as an aside.
Sometime, if you ever have the time, you should try taking a FLAC file, compressing a copy to MP3, AAC, or any other codec you like, inverting the phase in something like Audacity and play it against the original. You'll hear all the things that you're missing in the MP3.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Great - so, it's the 80's all over again.
We grew out of that. We'll do it again.
*shrug*
Kid-proof tablet..
PC audio testers always forget to test for the influence of power supply on output noise. I noticed simply changing the power supply makes a big difference to the output noise level. Also some ventilators and other PC components draw current in bursts so there are nice clicks on transitions. This will affect both on-board sound and internal audio cards. I can tolerate a few decibels of white noise, but I don't like to feel like a doctor listening to PC internals. So I'd like to know how an audio component performs in worst case power supply scenario.
Gah, audiophiles...
The average quality of the stuff people are listening to has gone up drastically over the last few decades. When I was young, we used to listen to tape recorded from the freakin' radio on nasty Walkman earbuds. You could hardly hear it! At home, most people I knew had a tape deck/record player. I've played around with them now, and they sound terrible. Combine that with the fact that most people''s record collections were scratched, and the listening experience is far inferior to what most people seem to have today.
Look, you like spending hundreds/thousands to get that extra 5% out of your music, okay, that's fine. But this constant bitching about how everyone who doesn't is some sort of backward buffoon is really grating.
most have never heard music on anything better than crappy cheap earbuds or, at best, a poorly configured home theater system
I could certainly afford a much better sound system than what I use, but I can't because:
1 - in a car or public transportation it's not worth it with the amount of noise going on. Better isolation of earbuds and active noise cancellation make a difference though.
2 - I live in an appartment so I cannot push the volume up. And at low volume there's not much difference.
3 - how often do you actively listen to music? Me, almost never, I usually put it on while doing something. So I'm not concentrating on the fine details of the highs or whatever
In other words, you are right but that's not how it works.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I concur, I've had a few motherboards that seem to have crosstalk issues - you could 'hear' the IDE bus etc. Discrete sound card didn't have the same problems.
That sounds epic. I'm sorry I missed it!
there was an earlier batch of x treme music that didnt fall in that category. people were looking for that for that very reason.
Read radical news here
Betty White is full of awesome and win! You know how people make jokes about the awesomeness of Chuck Norris? Well Betty White really is awesome. She's freaking hilarious in interviews.
Rather than getting a high end sound card I would suggest getting an external DAC. You can audition a few to find one you like (I use a C.E.C. DA53) and then just throw in a cheap soundcard. In fact cheap cards based on Via chipsets are often the best because they are capable of "bit-perfect" output. In other words you can configure your media player (I use Winamp) to bypass the usual volume and mixing controls and send the raw data to the DAC. It is apparently easy in Linux but on XP you need ither kernel stream or ASIO4All and in Vista/7 you need WASAPI.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
With all due respect, if you aren't pushing the $100 headphone bracket or the studio monitor bracket more like $400 each, you're not in a category that can reasonably make the kind of value judgment regarding audio quality that's under discussion here
You completely missed the point.
Joe Schmuckatelli does not have $100 headphones and $400 speakers on his PC. Those that do are the aforementioned outliers.
Joe Schmuckatelli also doesn't know what a sound card is other than "the thing I plug my speakers into", if even that.
I don't think Joe Schmuckatelli would have a place at the table where this discussion would be taking place...do you?
Living With a Nerd
Or Morgan Freeman.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
No, but he's got to be considered if you're going to start throwing around bullshit numbers.
None of the use cases offered as justification for your numbers even approach "common" much less "average person" use.
The discussion at hand has just cemented, in my mind, the notion that discrete sound cards are a niche product.
The discussion at hand has just cemented, in my mind, the notion that discrete sound cards are a niche product.
On that, I completely agree. The difference is noticable, but as far as I'm concerned, on-board is "good enough". I'd rather spend that $50-$300 on more RAM, a better CPU, or a better video card.
But that's just me.
Living With a Nerd
So, people like Betty White because she's awesome and funny?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
What you wanted was an Aureal A3D 2 card. Unfortunately, Creative Labs bought them, and buried them.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This. As long as you don't use the motherboard's DAC, you will get nice, clean digital sound with no interference. If you have an external receiver, motherboard sound is just as good as a discrete card. If you want to use the DAC in a computer, be prepared for a noisy environment.
I wasn't being sarcastic at all.
That first CD-ROM drive was simply marked "CD-ROM." It wasn't until they introduced faster drives (2x, etc.) that they started making the distinction on the slower 1x drives.
I wish I had kept that stuff... I still have my old USR Courier modem, tank that it was. My old computers would have made a great nostalgic mini-museum.
Gah, audiophiles...
Gah, misunderstanding morons.
I'm a recording engineer. I'm not an audiophile. I listen to things on everything from crappy 1993 car stereo systems to multi-thousand dollar sound systems. And I might point out the difference is a lot more than 5%. Now, the difference between my personal $500 sound system and the multi-thousand dollar systems I work on does not justify the price difference for anyone I know, but that's the privilege of a university's purchasing power.
Did I say that everyone who doesn't spend a fortune on music is a buffoon? No. I said that the people who claim to care about their music and love their music, listening on crappy computer speakers are pathetically wrong on what they're hearing, as well as the people who have never heard a CD quality source or a good Vinyl Record source.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I could certainly afford a much better sound system than what I use, but I can't because:
I'll address each point inline with your's.
1 - in a car or public transportation it's not worth it with the amount of noise going on. Better isolation of earbuds and active noise cancellation make a difference though.
I use a Klipsch isolating headset I got from Tiger Direct on one of their sales for $30. Sounds great and I can listen to music at half the volume of the stock Palm Pre headset, and still hear a significant difference in quality.
2 - I live in an appartment so I cannot push the volume up. And at low volume there's not much difference.
Ironic because at low volumes is where I hear the most significant difference between a high quality system and a cheap crappy one. Even if this reasoning is good, a pair of Grados is not that expensive.
3 - how often do you actively listen to music? Me, almost never, I usually put it on while doing something. So I'm not concentrating on the fine details of the highs or whatever
And how often do you actively watch TV? Everyone I know has a TV going on in the background while doing something else, but they'll still dump thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars into a "Home Theater" system with top of the line Blu-Ray player and 60" 1080p, but neglect to get anything better than the cheapest surround sound system they can find and then neglect to configure it.
In other words, you are right but that's not how it works.
...and my point is that it the two should not be mutually exclusive. In the 70s you could find people who would literally just sit down and listen to tape loops for hours. Granted they were often in some altered state of mind, but still, they would focus on hearing every subtle nuance in the music before they stopped. Now, we don't even care that there's the nastiest autotune on vocals making it sound like it's robotic because people can't sing but they want to sound "perfect" (and I'm not talking about T Pain on that one).
<soapbox>My point in all of this is that, music should not be the bastard child of urbanization, used only to block out the sounds of the world around you. It should be something that you sit down with the intention to enjoy. The more people ignore that, the crappy it will get. I just hope that it will end up with a renaissance of sorts, with people realizing that this stuff really is getting bad and starting to consider that the money they're investing in a sound system isn't going to waste. </soapbox>
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Except "worse" implies something is already "bad".
Best
Better
Good
Less Good
No Change
Less Bad
Bad
Worse
Worst
If you won $53 million and the amount was suddenly reduced to $52.5 million, would you be "worse off" or "less well-off"?
Ok, indiscreet isn't spelled exactly the opposite of discrete, but it's on the continuum.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And that is why, at a recent AES conference there was a great little speech given about how Audio is the only industry that eats its young. If it doesn't matter to the average consumer how it sounds, than we will progressively get worse and worse quality audio considered passable. It's sad enough that people are preferring the sound of MP3s and most have never heard music on anything better than crappy cheap earbuds or, at best, a poorly configured home theater system, yet they claim to love their music. If I had a nickel for every time I've sat someone down in front of a decent quality sound system (think $500 system, counting receiver and speakers or receiver and headphones) and played them an album that they, "know inside and out" and they find something new that they've heard before, I would be able to afford the amazing speakers that a friend works with. Let's be honest, as long as people consider iTunes 128 kbps AAC to be, "High Quality" and 256 kbps AAC to be, "Highest Quality" with 128 MP3 being acceptable, it doesn't matter how expensive your soundcard is, it won't sound good.
Why does it matter? If the listener is happy, who cares. Oh yeah, by the way, $500 is far from impressive. What, did you pick up a home theatre in a box deal? If you run a $3000 rig a home for music and $1000 setup in your car and can't stand the sound from your ear buds, maybe you are just being a pretentious asshole. Even better, if you are as familiar with sound quality as you posture to be, you would know, and accept, the difference. Instead, you take the side that you know better than everyone else. Thanks, very helpful. "Loving music" has fuck-all to do with sound quality. I suppose those who enjoyed the early days of radio didn't love their music?
In my experience, the only time it's worth having a discrete sound card is if you have a kick-ass set of headphones (or speaker setup). For the average $100 set of headphones/$400 speaker setup? Totally unecessary.
That's largely true, but I'd disagree with the specific numbers. You can get headphones for under $100 that will easily demonstrate just how crappy a lot of on-board sound is. My cheapo speakers sound just fine (for what they are) hooked up to my various desktops or laptops over the past few years, but Grado SR60s or SR80s (~$70 and ~$100 respectively) plugged into the same systems have let me hear the entire range of hissing and weird electrical interference out there, to the point that it was more annoying to listen to stuff with them than the speakers despite them having (potentially) much better sound quality, at least until I got an external USB audio device to run them through.
It's enough of a pain these days for me to get a quiet enough room for them to be worth using to listen to stuff that I don't bother very often anymore, though. The cheap speakers plugged straight into the on-board sound are good enough most of the time, or my Etymotics now that I have a desktop motherboard and laptop that both have decently non-noisy sound output. I'm just not nearly picky or rich enough to put more effort/money into it at the moment, because good enough is good enough. Heh.
I think you missed the 90s.
Kid-proof tablet..
And how often do you actively watch TV?
I haven't for the last 24 years, actively or passively. I'd rather listen to music.
Now, we don't even care that there's the nastiest autotune on vocals
Which is why I prefer atrocious death-metal 'singers' to autotuned pop crap any day.
My point in all of this is that, music should not be the bastard child of urbanization, used only to block out the sounds of the world around you
Which takes me kind of off-topic about fake motor sounds being added to recent models of electric cars. We had a chance of getting the cities a little more quiet, but now, we'd rather pile on the crap. Why not make electric cars stink of petrol fumes while we are at it ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
And for lack of a better response to all those points, I applaud you.
Granted I'm not a fan of death metal in anyway, but I had a funk producer tell me that the vocals needed to be in tune so he autotuned them and I almost slapped him... Totally agree on the electric cars remark...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I'll just add one last thing, I'm not averse to upgrading sound quality as I just got an interesting device, the Asus uBoom, to get rid of the wifi-induced noise of the embedded sound card on my old laptop. Easy to move along with the laptop (within my home!) as it's only one piece (and 2 cables) and contains the USB sound card. Not a revolution though.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
My last computer build I bought some nice higher end speakers that supported Optical In. My motherboard didn't. So I bought a sound card that did. I think it cost me 30$. Other than situations like that I would say no, you don't really need a sound card. Years ago it was the difference between normal sound and the 8-bit noises that the "PC Speaker" would make. Now every motherboard pretty much comes with integrated sound that is good enough for the average user.
I remember seeing a few years back a motherboard with integrated sound using vacuum tubes for audiophiles which was a pretty interesting idea. Not sure how well it sold though, if I were a betting man, I would say it didn't.
Generally consumer based audio cards are no better than the on board ones. There is nearly no difference in sound quality and in many cases the same DAC's are used. That said, prosumer and professional grade cards are really the only ones suitable for DAW systems. The consumer based cards lack features such as XLR input, True TOS input and output, as well as having extremely responsive DACs which provide very low latency. Try setting up a JACK echo effect on your home PC soundcard and you will quickly realise that it's just not up to the task.
I've had much the same experience. My VIA Mini-ITX box has excellent audio output. My Macintosh, on the other hand, sounds like crap, so I have a USB audio box.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Buggerfuck. I meant to mod you Insightful and hit Redundant by mistake. Posting to undo. Have a nice reply telling you how insightful your comment was instead.
H.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I was originally told by the person who built my computer how great on-board cards have become and how there is no need for a dedicated one. That was quickly shot down when I found out not only how particularly low the quality was (It was a SoundMax attached to an "Asus P5E3 Deluxe" mother board), but that I didn't have any proper support for environmental effects used in games (e.g. EAX) and OpenAL didn't work very well either (i.e. it would drastically reduce performance/framerate and/or sound would become very choppy). I even remember sound effects cutting out like crazy in Bioshock which was very annoying.
I also agree with the article about "business class" boards. This explains why the school computers always had MUCH higher quality audio from their respective on-board sound card than what I was getting from my gaming rig. Nowadays, I have an external "Sound Blaster X-Fi" (i.e. Model No. SB1090 which are surprisingly popular given how often they become sold out) which works great because it has all the perks of its internal counterpart with the advantage of being placed outside of the case (thus there is no electrical interference). Yes, it can potentially be a CPU hog (since it is a USB sound device and all), but I am only using stereo headphones (as opposed to a 5+ channel setup) and plus I have a very fast CPU.
I just wish the article covered more on the Soundblaster X-Fi. It seemed to mention it but then focus on the Asus board far too much. I know the Asus one is a far better sound card but it would have still been nice to have both compared.