Slashdot Mirror
$50 Sound Cards Impress Versus Integrated Audio
crookedvulture writes "Most PCs have audio integrated right on the motherboard. There's much to be gained from upgrading to a discrete sound card, though. This look at a couple of sub-$50 sound cards from Asus explores what can be found at the budget end of the spectrum. In blind listening tests, both cards produced better sound than an integrated solution. They also offered superior signal quality, but neither had an impact on gaming performance. The days of hardware-accelerated game audio seem to be behind us, with developers handling positional audio processing in software."
Most of the improvement is likely due to increased distance between the amplification circuits and the noisy AC/DC power supply.
there, done in one.
cheap cmedia usb sound dongles (not all dongles are cmedia, in fact most are not so you have to shop carefully) and also the burr brown PCM series all do a decent job of converting 44 and 48k audio (including dvd audio downmixed to 2.0) to spdif.
everyone's avr, today, has opto in. the sound card dongles send out usb audio over opto to spdif-in of your home stereo. if its 5.1 or newer, it will accept opto just fine. (aka toslink).
nothing else to care about, pretty much. let your stereo (or DAC) do the heavy lifting. usb audio is the way to go (for future, use UAC2, usb audio class 2 which works fine with linux and some hacks on windows at 24bit and 192k, personally verified to be bit-perfect).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
it would be on a cheap video card before a sound card. I never bought any sound cards after they started puting them on the mobo. Sure the sound could be better but I have a stereo for playing tunes and if i'm playing games at night I'm using headphones anyway. A better soundcard is a non-issue for most users.
a DIY I wrote on how to open up a cm102 (cmedia usb audio dongle) and find the 3 solder pads you need to connect in your own toslink (TOTX) opto transmitter for your home stereo:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4086/5052505190_07d7ec5903_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4148/5052506250_c71b26586a_b.jpg
it was just that simple. there was already an onboard cheap-o toslink sender but I prefer the standard square block style.
the TOTX part is a dollar or so at digikey or mouser (suppliers). the usb dongle is $15 or less, often much less. make sure its cmedia and cm102. it will work very well then.
usb powers it and you know its working when you get the red light out of the toslink end ;)
I'm not sure it passes dts or dolby digital but its fine for 44.1 cd audio (and mp3) as well as 48k dvd downmix to stereo 2.0
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
These are not audio people and did not have an audio-expert look at their write-up. Why. They got the very well known very-low-cost / not-very-good audio OpAmp NE5532 P wrong as NE55329. No audio-expert would make that mistake. It is not a number, it is an identity that experts immediately recognize.
I have to say that this puts a big question-mark on the whole test for me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just a guess, but I'd say it's because there's stories just like yours for every manufacturer out there*.
Case in point: hard drives. Ask 20 people what hard drives they've had trouble with, and you'll find they pretty much average out as all of the companies having issues. I use Seagate, but you'll find a lot of people here who swear they're the worst drives on the market.
Another example: T-Mobile. I had nothing but trouble with them. They would, for no reason, forgo the automatic draft from my Visa and then shut me off for non-payment. Their customer service was horrible. When I called them at the end of my contract and told them I wanted my service cut as soon as the contract was over, the sales drone threatened me that if I didn't pay the final bill, they'd sue me. I hadn't said anything about it up to then, so this was just out of the blue. (Of course, I knew he was full of shit, and intentionally didn't pay my final bill because of it.)
With all that, T-Mobile has an excellent reputation for customer service and very few people I know have issues with them. Go figure.
The article was about the difference between soundcards and integrated sound, and just happened to use Asus cards for the testing. Your last paragraph was on topic, but the rest of your post wasn't.
* There are a few manufacturers that have earned widespread derision, like PC Chips for its fake cache chips or SCO for judicial douchebaggery. Asus isn't anywhere near that level.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Discrete sound...Is farting silently
No, that is a soundless indiscretion.
Actually their RightMark audio analysis's don't show this at all, frequency response, THD, noise, are all so close between devices that a human wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them, the ignoramuses at TechReport however don't know how to read the graphs/understand the limit of human hearing and came to erroneous conclusions.
Their section on different peoples opinion of the various audio devices does not state the result of the blind listening test and so is useless, why even bother with tests that are not blind?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The only other thing to be gleaned from the graphs is that running at 96kHz is pointless because the supposedly better cards' performance FUCKING SUCKS past 20kHz.