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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.
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.
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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.
My motherboard has optical SPDIF in and I'd never use a DAC in the PC environment, it's just too noisy.
I used to think the same thing too. Amazingly enough, you can engineer your way around the noise and create a very good sound card, at least from my informal experience with a handful of different cards. That said, most motherboard solutions (including laptop versions, unfortunately) are nearly worthless because of the price optimization pressure.
Some years ago, I had an undergraduate student design an audio I/O card for a research computer we were developing. She did a remarkably good job. Despite being buried in the middle of an environment with a fair bit of electrical noise, the card produced quite good sound that was essentially as quiet as it would be as if it were in a separate enclosure. She had proper power supply and ground isolation, local re-regulation, and ran all signal traces on internal layers with ground/power planes on the external faces of the PCB. Worked great.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
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
OK, everyone's talking about the noise produced inside a PC, but what in a PC is going to have noise at audible frequecnies?
You don't need noise at audible frequencies, you only need noise that produces unwanted harmonics at audible frequences.
EMI, for one, introduces all kinds of artifacts. Have you ever held your mobile phone near a powered speaker? Did you hear the crackling/popping noise coming from it? Yet, your phone communicates at 900MHz or above, which by your reasoning should be inaudible. High-resolution DACs are very sensitive to electrical interference. Such interference usually does not mean co-resonance (where the device oscillates with the same frequency as the noise source), but more often "beating".
In the same vein, there are plenty of devices inside a PC that impact the stability of the power supply voltage rails. Small wrinkles on the power rail might again cause DAC inaccuracy, but of more importance is its impact on signal timing: a power surge (or dip) will affect the slew rate of transistors, which can cause inaccuracies in the timing of signals.
In how many ways this can affect music reproduction is up for debate. But usually the second form of interference (jitter) causes much more audible problems than the first.
The music gives it away.
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