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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 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
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
Sound cards used to be sold because their ability to decode sound was done on the card rather than having the CPU doing it, which would slow down the gaming performance (somewhat). I'm sure that sound cards also have other features not found in on-board chipsets, but most of those are for things like high end gaming.
About 7 years ago I remember getting an on-board NVIDIA chipset that had hardware decoding of mp3 files. The CPU utilization of the system without the hardware decoding the CPU jumped to about 45% continuous while playing back the mp3 file. On the rig with the NVIDIA chipset with hardware decoding the CPU utilization was nearly imperceptible. It became to expensive for NVIDIA to offer those for long so they replaced them with generic sound chipsets.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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
Or because people prefer the sound of vinyl, coloration and all. You can measure the performance of a medium and determine which is the most neutral (or the "best" from a technical pov), but that doesn't always equate to the one which people think sounds "best" to their ears. I get into this a lot with audio fans who say that their $xxxx gear sounds "better" than something much cheaper, despite the test results saying the cheaper one is as good or better from a transparency pov - our ears don't always like transparent (tube amps are great evidence of that!).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
7 years ago a new system would have been built with a 1.8-2.3Ghz Athlon XP or a 2.5-3.5Ghz Pentium 4. If you managed to make an MP3 decode eat up 45% of the CPU with any of those chips, you were doing something horribly wrong.
I read the internet for the articles.
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!
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?
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
The music gives it away.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
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.
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.
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.