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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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
Actually, the Chicago Manual of Style allows " Asus' " as an alternative to "Asus's". Just make sure to be consistent.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
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.
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.
I prefer language to be understandable in both its written and spoken forms. Asus' may show the possessive form when written down, but spoken you lose that information. Asus's is clearly possessive in both written and spoken form. I also think Asus's looks better.
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.
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/
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.
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 prefer language to be understandable in both its written and spoken forms.
It is, but that's why we have separate dialects for speech and for writing. There's no need to compensate for the weaknesses of one in the dialect used for the other.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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..
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
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.