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Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment?
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Back in the day (which is a scientific measurement for anyone who used to walk to school during snowstorms, uphill, both ways), integrated audio solutions had trouble earning respect. Many enthusiasts considered a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It's been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced, a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs, in general. These days, the Sound Blaster ZxR is Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's integrated audio solution. It also features a built-in headphone amplifier, beamforming microphone, a multi-core Sound Core3D audio processor, and various proprietary audio technologies. While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects and it also produces noticeably superior audio in music and movies, provided your speakers can keep up."
Onboard sound is finally Good Enough*, and has been Good Enough* for a long time now.
* YMMV, offer void in Tennessee.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
And past this post, no further information from Slashdot ever reached my location.
Most of the cards, even the famous "Sound Blasters," that I've looked at all suffer from serious quality control issues. I bought my last Sound Blaster in '07, it died two hissing and popping years later with a horrible squeal.
Yes, a discrete card might have *better* specs (especially analog components, which was a problem on older integrated soundcards), but I haven't felt the need to use a discrete card since my nForce 2 board (Soundstorm).
Besides, it saves me from using Creative's bloatware.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
For the average user, onboard is just fine.
For a power user (gamer/developer), onboard is probably good enough.
If you're an audio pro and/or you're building a semi/professional audio rig, onboard isn't going to cut it 99% of the time.
FWIW, plug in sound cards are actually more common than a lot of people think, because a lot of people seem to think that if it doesn't go into a PCI slot, it's not a sound card.
The Rocksmith cable, with its built-in discrete audio unit, is a prime example, one that I use almost daily.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Whatever you do, don't buy Creative. They intentionally crippled drivers around 2008.
I love the fact that discrete sound cards exist. It makes it a lot easier to not order one, so that my PC doesn't assail my ears every time some obnoxious video starts auto-playing after I open up a window.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm still bitter about Aureal.
For most of us, no. Onboard sound is great and getting better all the time. If you're an audiophile or using your system to do professional mixing or music then it is worth it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
> While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects.
To get 89.1 times better signal-to-noise performance, they use official Monster(R) brand, gold-plated, platinum-tipped 14-nm processes in their PC chip designs.
No.
Back in the day, integrated audio was the frickin' PC speaker that could only produce one square wave at a time with no volume control whatsoever, apart from software 'hacks'.
And Creative Labs were far from the first ones, learn a bit of history and get off my lawn.
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People who know and value quality audio are willing to buy discrete audio cards even though it costs them more money.
However, they don't realize that the improvement they see is because they are also willing to pay more money for quality cables. It's the solid gold Monster Cables that they buy because the salesperson at Fry's recommends them that is really the source of the improved audio quality.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Any money spent on a sound card is better off spent on speakers and a good DAC, which often come together.
High end sound systems and speaker systems these days have digital inputs, thus an onboard DAC. If you're using a digital output on your motherboard to connect to a digital input on the speaker, the onboard sound card has ZERO effect on the quality of the audio. The bits are traveling directly, unmolested from the application generating them to the amplifiers in the speakers.
Now, if you have audiophile-type equipment that uses analog inputs, then YES, the analog sound you feed into those inputs needs to come from a high quality DAC. High end sound cards tend to have good DACs, but you can get the same effect by using an outboard DAC, which has a digital input and analog outputs, and is also AWAY from your PC, so your analog audio is less likely to be affected by interference from the motherboard or power supply.
You can get DACs with USB inputs, but USB adds latency so is best avoided for gaming. For music, go to town with a USB DAC; it won't matter there.
The gist of it is, the most important component is the DAC. The DAC completely determines the quality. Everything else is just hype. :)
> While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects...
After many problems with sound cards, sound cards drivers and video drivers, I removed sound hardware from my PC.
I use the HDMI output of my video card, connected to an Audio Video amplifier and that's all. 5.1 when needed, in games or VLC.
Totof
Onboard can be a pain in linux. I still keep a couple SBLive32's around just in case I need one.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
...but discrete soundcards, especially external ones, are still alive and well if you record. The noise floor of internal sound cards hasn't gotten that much better (a PC is very noisy RF environment), and if you need mic preamps, quarter inch jacks, optical in, etc, they generally don't fit on a PCI card or laptop.
But for general gaming or home theater use? Nope. Send the audio out over the HDMI out, or SPDIF for DVI/VGA rigs, and let the amp sort it out.
-R C
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
I use the motherboard audio to plug my headphones into. However, the volume for headphones is never high enough even with the volume control maxed out in Windows. Would a separate audio card fix this problem?
Why bother with a card when you can offload that to a piece of audio gear over HDMI? My PC is connected to a quality receiver with a high end DAC, so putting in a board from Creative is just silly.
Onboard D/A for WAV, MP3, Movies, etc are generally good enough if the noise level is low enough. The biggest difference is in the on board synth. Playing games uses MIDI and the sound card produces the sounds. There are 2 versions. Hardware and software.
Hardware had an on board synth. It can be as simple as an 8 bit video game or as complex as full wavetable sampled sounds. An onboard hardware synth will sound the same on Linux or Windows. If the wavetable synth is XG compatible or similar, the sound is great. If a cheap synth is used it will sound like a casio entry level keyboard or 8 bit videogame.
Some cards use soft synth's with soundfonts. These can be very good sounding with inexpensive hardware as the synth runs in the OS and just sends the bitstream to the card for repoduction. This uses some system resources and requires installing the proper driver to include the synth and soundfont. This can mean great game sound in WIndows, but no sound or missing sound in Linux for games, unless you load a soft synth on Linux, install a soundfont, and enable it through Jack. While the combo does sound great, it is a resource drain.
Now, which is better? Mixed bag here. Some on board sound come in either variety. Same with add on boards.
The truth shall set you free!
Sound Cards are good enough? Good enough for what? The average consumer? Sure, for anyone really interesting in producing the best sound quality possible, not quite. I know I am an exception because I am an audio engineer, but most intel/amd sound chips don't support high range, 5.1 or 7.1 surround. Good enough to enjoy a game sure. But why build a Lamborghini only to put an 8 track player in it and drive around with the muffler hanging out the back dragging on the ground.
The audio on motherboards is very good. Some have lower noise level than PCI sound cards. I had one Dell motherboard that was very good for transfers from audio tape and reel-to-reel; better than my sound blaster cards. The more recent USB external sound systems are very much better; at least the ones I have heard. I use a Terratec DMX6FireUSB instead of a pre-amplifier feed into active speakers and a 5 channel power amplifier.
In the middle ages (when EAX was a big deal) it was marketed as being "environmental audio" so it would sound like you were really there!
What it really was, for the most part, was a dedicated 32, 64 or 128 channel hardware 3D positional sound mixer... back when you had a 100MHz processor, this would let you get these effects without sacrificing CPU power and taking it away from the rest of the games.
But now, with our 3GHz multi-core CPUs, sound mixing is such a tiny part, that you *really* don't need this dedicated hardware anymore, and these onboard chips (which are mostly just a fancy DAC anyway) are fine, with some caveats.
One issue I have is for some reason my GPU bleeds noise onto the sound device, so I get this annoying high pitched whine whenever there's no sound in a game.. however, once the music or sound effects start, I don't notice it anymore.
Perfect captcha: unneeded
In an effort to differentiate its product from its rivals, Gigabyte's G1.Sniper series has been including upgraded audio. Interchangeable OP-AMP, audio rated capacitors, and a soundblaster chip. The difference between the sound quality compared to integrated 7.1 surround sound on higher-end boards is huge. You can notice the improvement in quality in only a couple of seconds. I haven't been willing to pay for discrete graphics for a while but considering Gigabyte is including these upgrades in fairly mid-range boards, its worth a look.
If you really want low noise (perhaps you dislike noise or are planning to amplify the sound to very loud levels), you do not want a sound card inside a PC case powered by a PCI bus. Forget it.
Look for something that runs over USB with its own power supply. Or get an external DAC that takes SPDIF or TOSLINK from a motherboard -- motherboard digital outputs are just fine of course.
If you are really (or ever did) considering plopping down hundreds for a PCI sound card.... sorry, you bought in to the marketing.
I can't wait to buy a shiny new Sound Blaster ZxR so I can get that noticeably superior audio. It'll be great for my collection of 128 Kbps MP3s!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Usb adapters replaced pci cards for us die hard users. Why wouldn't I want a audio solution for both my laptop and desktop.
"back in the day" the main selling point of a "good" soundcard, was compatibility. Under Dr, each and every game had to reinvent the wheel and communicate directly with the soundcard. Unless you had one of major 'good' cards (Soundblaster, Gravis ultrasound, and one or two others) old games wouldn't have sound at all. When Windows became the norm, the hardware communication was abstracted hough the windows driver - as long as Windows support the card, a game could use it. Combined with dirt-cheap integrated cards in most motherboards, there's very little need for discrete audio for non-professional use anymore. We've reached "good enough" 15+ years ago.
There are plenty of external boxes that allow for more options for recording and output at that price range. There's are good 2x2 boxes out there for less even.
If you are working in audio, you are using different kit. If you are an audiophile, you are probably just using the digital output into an amp anyway.
Gravis UltraSound.
I had the optical output on my motherboard run into my home theater receiver in the living room (where the computer was too). After 3 years of the PC always being on and the optical LED being lit, the LED brightness had diminished (yes, this happens) to a point where it could not signal reliably over the cheap 30 foot optical cable I was using (I did a lot of troubleshooting). To remedy the problem I bought the cheapest sound card I could find with an optical output. That solved the problem.
I have since moved the PC into a different room (and upgraded the motherboard, CPU, etc) and went back to using analog headphones. I kept the sound card in the PC and used that with my headphones. Then one day that sound card quit working. So, now I use the analog out on my motherboard.
Full circle.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
My Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro 7.1 surround 24-bit 192KHz with an external breakout box (1/4" MIC, optical, etc.) has now been in 3 systems and is still going strong. I'm running Windows 8.1 using the DanielK drivers. It's PCI, so as long as I can buy a modern motherboard with a single PCI slot, I'm golden. In my opinion, is is one of the last great Creative Labs discrete sound cards.
I tried switching to the on-board sound in my latest build but I prefer the sound from the Audigy. My current motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-v deluxe and has a Realtek ALC898 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC.
However, much like computer systems in general, people have different requirements. If you just want something that will play sound, music, videos, games, etc. then the on-board sound should be adequate. If you get into podcasting, video creation, etc. then you might want something that can provide good quality I/O ports (i.e. MIC, Line-in/out, etc.). If you want excellent separation of sound for movies or gaming, then you are better off with a discrete sound card.
Is Creative the best? Probably not. But I haven't researched discrete sound cards since I bought the Audigy 2 about 9-10 years ago....
My old, circa 2008 Gateway machine wouldn't let me record the audio stream (aka, "What You Hear") with the onboard audio, had to install a discrete card to get that capability.
That's about the only useful thing I've done with a PCI sound card in the past decade.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I know that the headphone output on my new Lenovo laptop at work is horrible. No dynamic range and I am not that picky.
"No."
MOTU, RME Hammerfall, Pro Tools, Mackie. Or a cheap hobbyist like me uses Presonus, M-Audio, or Behringer. These sound interfaces feature TRS or XLR balanced 3-conductor connectors and cabling that are more resilient to RF noise. Sound Blaster cards offer only RCA 2-conductor which is a joke on the audiophiles.
I once had a signature.
The GUS architecture had a lot of potential. Too bad it couldn't garner more developer support.
If you need that kind of stuff then, sure, it's probably a good investment.
I don't and, as a result, haven't bought soundcard since 1996. The ones that came with my various motherboards have been just fine.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
And you probably get more noticeable gain in audio quality by acoustically treating your listening room. What good is a set of expensive speakers when the environment makes the sound crappy?
I once had a signature.
If you're mixing a lot of stuff on-board devices still fall apart, particularly if you're using a mic. Get an video player running, an MMO, TS/Skype/Mumble/whatever and a couple other things cranking and the on board device will click and pop when you speak, just as they've been doing for years and years.
wrt Soundblaster, I finally had enough of their absurd driver situation in Windows (which rival HP printer drivers for bloat and glitchyness,) their indifferent Linux support and their failure to create a straightforward PCI-E gaming card (at the time I was shopping.) I went with an ASUS Xonar DX 7.1 that uses a cmedia chip for my last build (18-ish months ago) and it's been great. Windows drivers are straightforward and it works in Linux with little drama. I honestly haven't given it a second thought (prior to this post) since I installed it.
I'll stop buying discrete audio when they start soldering audio chips that have full parity with discrete cards onto motherboards. Until then they may as well not bother providing half-ass on board codecs as far as I'm concerned.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If you use your onboard sound to connect to your home theatre via a digital connection (coax, optical, hdmi), it's pretty much perfect. So there goes the benefit for watching movies and audio.
TFS already says there isn't much difference with games.
All that leaves is recording.
In that case, a high quality USB microphone is probably going to be better.
Aside from the fact that this whole "submission" sounds like adspeak, decibels are logarithmic, so they are really saying that their soundcard has 124db SNR, while the competition has 124 - 10 * log(89.1) = 104.5db SNR. This is still a signal-to-noise ratio of roughly 28 billion to one.
As my grandpa used to say, "You're just pissing in the ocean, son."
When you are listening to low definition mp3's. It always makes me laugh to see folks with hi-fi head phones hooked up to an mp3 player listening to 64kbs - 128kbs music.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
... not one of you has mentioned ASIO - so you obviously don't use your PCs for making music, and more than likely don't even LIKE music (you just PRETEND to 'like' it, because everybody else is)...
Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hey, let's bust this damn and list some good alternatives. I would be glad to know about any good PCI ones.
I have been using Hercules that have Crystal semi chipset. They seem to work good in Linux (but not in Windows 7).
Now admittedly, I'm a bit bitter about a problem that's not really Creative's fault. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS for my laptop using PC Card...and then the next wave of laptops only came with an Expresscard slot. So, I ponied up again for an X-Fi card that fit the Expresscard slot...and then laptops stopped coming with those. Now I fully admit that Creative isn't to blame for that, but it is sad just the same. However, I digress.
I use my onboard audio for nearly all of my listening needs. My internal speakers are utter crap (I think one is blown, actually), and thus, even if Creative added all the super-duper offboard processing in the world, it wouldn't sound any better than what those speakers can pump. Adding a nice set of Sennheiser or Denon headphones, I can start to hear some of the MP3 sizzle in the 128kbps MP3s, and a handful of 192's, depending on the song and the encoder and settings used. Even playing video games, the difference between 'Good Enough' and 'X-Fi Good' never comes into play, because it's the nuts-and-bolts of the big picture that will make or break it in either direction - if the sound effects and musical score is good, the miniscule difference an audio chipset will make has nothing to do with it. If they're crap, a ZxR processor isn't going to change anything.
That being said, I still use offboard audio hardware on a regular basis. I use my Rane SL3 to DJ with Serato. Even if it wasn't a de facto hardware dongle to unlock the Serato software, there's no motherboard chipset that supports 2ms latency from end-to-end of the audio path. In other words, my SL3 can reliably take an audio signal from my turntable, translate it into speed and directional data, and send MP3 audio back out, in 2ms. Creative doesn't make hardware like that. The story is pretty similar for my Audio6 (which I use for Traktor) and my Connectiv (which I used to use for Torq and Deckadance, though it required closer to 5ms latency to be stable). I have a MobilePre USB that I use occasionally for XLR and 1/4" recording. These are niche products for niche purposes, but the fact that your local Guitar Center sells a range of these kinds of interfaces demonstrates that there's indeed a market for discrete audio hardware. Creative just doesn't make it.
I was once horrifically stung (what I realize was a very long time ago) with an Abit "audiomax" soundcard that came with my motherboard. Quite horrific interference amongst the many problems. In a fit of pique I bought an Asus Xonar that solved all my problems immediately.
Since then, I've been through a few motherboards, but plugged that Xonar in, and it's definitely 'better'
Now if I didn't have that Xonar, then I'd be as happy as the proverbial Larry with my on-board sound I can get today. On-board sound is quite definitely 'good enough' now, but seems a shame for people not to realize (if they care) they can make it a great deal better for a pretty low price.
And, I've carried this card with me for quite a while as my GPUs have come and gone. The price I've paid for my slightly better sound is now practically nothing per year.
I think people still care about sound, but it's just another check-box on your slightly more pimped mobo - in much the same way as a I got a deluxe board with an Intel network adaptor in addition to the Realtek.
It doesn't really matter that much, I don't expect most people to care, but to say that on-board is good enough for all simply isn't true.
My current on-board is wired to my desk speakers for the day to day stuff I want to listen to, and the Xonar is connected to my silly-number-of-speakers gaming headset.
It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.
Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.
Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.
As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...
Onboard is fine for the average user. It generally has shitty noise isolation though and is unusable for loud stuff and DEFINITELY unusable for pro audio work. S/PDIF isn't a solution either for most pro solutions unless you want monstrously expensive clock-sync gear.
Soundblaster cards are crap too. I know literally hundreds of music producers and DJs and they MUST use actual audio interfaces - NOT soundblasters. Things you buy in music stores work - from entry level stuff like M-Audio, Roland, Yamaha, to pro stuff like Presonus.
For games? Yeah - just stick with your on-board audio. It's cleaner now than it once was, but I had some damn noisy, poorly isolated boards years back.
Nonsense. I agree with you that there is no tangible quality difference between a $200 semi-pro box and a $3000 one. However, there is a massive, massive difference between on-board audio and even the cheapest semi-pro gear like M-Audio. Don't fool yourself.
At work I have a HiFiMeDIY Sabre Tiny USB DAC ($30) as my work laptop's internal audio is full of noise (hissing that changes with system activity).
At home, my gaming machine uses its onboard audio interface, but sends digital audio out via SP/DIF to my home theater receiver for its DAC and amplifier.
I even have an external sound interface for ham radio use, a Tigertronics SignaLink USB that's just an external ADC/DAC with some filtering and isolation which interfaces with my radio for digital modes (such as PSK31 or RTTY).
One thing that always annoyed me was on board devices going south and not enough expansion slots to add a card in.
USB theoretically has 127 slots to add a card in, if you buy a lot of 7-port hubs. A USB audio interface also lies outside the electrically noisy interior of a PC chassis.
I recently broke out my old Live 5.1 to play around with on my PC, because I was having a weird noise issue with the on board sound, and Creative's 64 bit beta drivers did not work. But guess what, C media had drivers for the now ancient 8738 that worked perfectly. On Board sound is still bottom rung stuff, but at the same time the bottom rung has improved noticeably. Another thing people forget is that on board sound is still connected to the same bus that off board sound is. Usually what you get with a sound card is a better dac.
My on-board Intel sound system doesn't provide the voltage to drive my headphones, so I inserted a Creative SB to do the job.
So, yeah, me too.
I use a 12.4 channel Obecalp System with moon rock cables!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
5 of the best DACs
Which integrated audio is it comparing to?
Let's use Realtek as an example, because they're a very common one. They have a variety of chips, ranging from the ALC231 to the ALC1150,
The ALC231 is rubbish. Four output channels (two stereo outputs), four input channels, and a 97dB SNR on output. But even that is probably enough for most users.
A good "middle-end" chip is the ALC861. That brings you up to 7.1 audio out, and a pile of sound-processing features (EAX, A3D, all that - including Creative's own standards). You still only have a 90dB SNR, but on a clean line that's tolerable. And it's cheap enough to be seen on sub-$150 motherboards.
Their top-end ALC1150 is basically the same, adding a few more output channels for some reason, a second ADC, and a 115dB SNR. That puts you above the low-end SoundBlasters, and within spitting distance of the high-end ones. On an integrated chipset. For anyone not doing professional audio work, that's probably enough. And you can find it on motherboards that cost less than this discrete card alone - sometimes even with advanced features like swappable op-amps.
It gets worse, because the main advantage of a discrete card is the SNR. Problem is, S/PDIF over TOSLINK is becoming a more common feature. And that means your computer's DAC doesn't matter - it's done on the sound system itself. Line noise isn't an issue, because it's fiber-optic. Every single Realtek chip I looked at supported this - probably not every implementation does, but it's something that doesn't cost the manufacturer any more than the cost of the connectors. That's another blow against them.
This isn't like video cards, where integrated can handle light users but any remotely intensive task requires at least a low-end discrete card. Probably not even one in a thousand users will need a discrete sound card - the ones who need more than the low-end integrated chips, like gamers, will be buying mobos that already have a higher-end audio chip.
No, not if you are a consumer of sound.
If you are a creator of sound, or music, then discrete audio hardware is a must. But you all knew that already. You cannot create music on the audio hardware that comes onboard a PC or Mac.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Push audio out to as close to the amplifier as possible as S/PDIF data.
If you are amplifying an analogue signal within a PC case and expecting higher quality you are kidding yourself.
Integrated audio is a bit of a running joke, see Goat Simulator system requirements...
"Decades", plural? That'd be 1994. As I understand it, PC games were still including FM soundtracks back then. For example, Doom II has its 20th birthday this September. Software-mixed tracker soundtracks came into use on PC around the time of Jazz Jackrabbit, also in 1994.
So it's all good.
a) most peoples' computers are making so much noise (fans, etc) that the only way you're going to have a chance to hear the difference will be with $1000 totally-closed cup headphones - do a lot of people have them on their computer?
b) otherwise, even if their PC is silent, their speakers are usually craptastic 3" logitechs, *maybe* with a cheapo sub buried in the shag carpet (ie a somewhat sub-optimal listening environment)
c) finally, last time I checked *most* people are listening to relatively crappy lossy mp3s ripped from youtube videos. It really, truly, doesn't matter how lovely a board you're sending crap sound data through: GIGO.
So I guess these boards are still relevant to the microniche of audiophile enthusiasts that have a nearly-silent PC and hardware, floor-scale speakers connected to their system (or 4-digit $ headphones), and who listen to audiophile-caliber audio....meaning nearly nobody.
That might explain why Creative Labs stock ($36.63 in March 2000) is $1.78 today.
-Styopa
Anyone remember playing CS or HL1 with an Aureal card?
It was unreal - and this in 1998. Aureal basically did ray-tracing, but for sound. It was A M A Z I N G.
As I understand it, Creative destroyed them with the costs of fighting off spurious legal action.
I'm not sure even now ten years later Creative has the same quality, and I wouldn't buy it from them even if they did.
If in addition to playing sound it had general purpose sound cards for audio proccessing and transcoding (lets say HW ogg, flac, opus, mp3, aac, etc..) exposed to the OS, it would be worth it.
Or mabey if it had a built in amplifier, with vaccuum tubes, or a XLR or 1/4 inch inputs/outputs you could jack it dirrectly into a guitar or amplifer.
If a cheap synth is used it will sound like a casio entry level keyboard or 8 bit videogame.
Ironic that I was reading this while listening to an NSF file, which is music designed for playback through an 8-bit soft synth.
If you are capturing or producing analog audio in the computer, things like the SNR, latency, et cetera are of parmount importance and high quality hardware can be essential. An example of this would be someone doing home or professional studio recording or some kind of scientific or technical solution.
But, if the issue is just the quality of the playback sound for music, video, gaming and the usual home uses, I do not see much benefit. Modern CPU's are fast enough that the overhead of integrated sound is not that great. If you have speakers good enough to benefit from the higher quality audio, then you probably have a receiver with an excellent DAC built in. Even the lowest-end integrated audio device can output pure digital magic to your receiver.
You'll benefit a lot more by buying a receiver with a good DAC and some good speakers to go with it. Then, for normal home use, the advantages of high end sound cards are virtually non-existent.
With the amount of porn I consume, a discreet audio card is critical.
I liked Dr Sbaitso, talking parrots and realtime voice changing software included with various incarnations of sound blaster. It was all a lot of fun.
Yet my last memories of SB was going thru driver hell as creative was seemingly incapable of producing a driver not constantly subject to crashing and burning on multi-processor systems.
Today sound comes from motherboard to stereo receiver via optical SPDIF. Are bits pushed from sound blaster over SPDIF better in some way than bits pushed from generic audio codecs? Or is it as provably worthless as those $3000 HDMI cables?
Whatever special audio processing SB is doing in that custom ASIC of theirs is it really something a modern CPU/GPU lacks overhead to implement?
In support of sound blaster I could see driving headphones/desktop speakers directly benefit from a high quality sound card... although personally I will never be picky enough to care.
ASIO is very awesome and my mobo sucks at microphone input. Even worse line in is not isolated causing noise from computer to feedback into connected radio's and players.
I tried to remember the last time I bought a discrete sound card. Then I remembered. It was back when I paid $20 for Open Sound System aka OSS/Linux because I couldn't seem to correctly compile support in the kernel for my shiny new soundblaster 16.
In short..... a really really long time ago
Titanfall shipped with the audio decompressed because the alternative was to use a spare core to run the audio decompression. A good sound card takes the load off an overtaxed CPU. If you're rockin' an i5+ then that's not a problem, but otherwise it helps.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most kids nowadays may not notice the difference, specially when using crappy headphones or speakers. But if you have good quality audio equipment and listen to music or watch movies on the PC, then yes a good discrete sound card is still very much worth it.
Are you a consumer of audio, or are you producing it?
The requirements and objectives of these two groups are wildly different. These discussions generally divide consumers into groups, instead of dividing consumers ("audiophiles" and "casual listeners") from producers ("recording" and "synthesizing").
I don't know if the people from the "consumers" group can understand just how important my "sound cards" are (a good old Delta 1010 and a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20), and my system would probably be a royal pain for someone whose objective is A/V theatre, gaming, or music listening.
It's good that some of the consumer gear has been converging on pro gear, because it means that for playback at least, we now have inexpensive systems with audio fidelity beyond the threshold of human perception. Awesome as that is, other things are important to people who are producing audio, and not all of us have "audio production budgets."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Which meant that without some hackery ISA DMA channels are unavailable breaking all the existing sound blaster games in MS-DOS I haven't cared. Sure for a while there was some interesting TSR's that'd hook with emm386 to simulate the ISA DMA to a PCI sound card, but now that we live in the future, I can use something like PCem, and just emulate the entire PC.
Also, since that horrible time, even the cheapest Pentium II board had built in AC97 sound support. But I see that Creative Labs is trying to keep the Sound Blaster name relevant these days, and even partners with motherboard OEM's to embed the SB stuff onto boards. Even my MSI z87 has a SoundBlaster built in. Although it doesn't matter, I run it through an amp I found on the street, through some speakers I bought for $50 Hong Kong. It sounds 'good enough ' to me.
Unless it's 220, 5, 1 I really don't care.
You wont be buying a sound-blaster....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Very few (any?) onboard audio solutions offer hardware mixing. With faster PCs and alsa dmix this may not be a noticeable issue anymore--until you have a rogue/old app open /dev/dsp directly and now you get nothing but silence from other apps...
SB Awe, Live, and newer all offered true HW mixing--up to 16 channels IIRC. While there may be other issues with creative's offerings, gotta at least give them credit for this feature where it's due.
The ad looks like a repeat of the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Anyone remember it? Back right before Windows Vista came out, people could pop down $200 and Creative promised all these amazing features. Then shortly later, people started upgrading to Windows Vista and discovered the drivers from Creative was crippled unstable crap! And Creative had several excuses as to why it had to be that way.
So Daniel K. did all the work of modding drivers to make the card fully functional on Vista. Creative didn't have to do a thing other than sit back and accept the work had been done for free! Instead, Creative threw their lawyers at Daniel K. to eliminate the Audigy Vista drivers.
"Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." This is the type of thanks you get from Creative when you buy their $200 crap.
Well, Windows 9 is predicted to be coming out in 2015. And with a new version of Windows just around the corner, Creative has another $200 card with the promise of all these amazing features. And after Windows 9 is release and people upgrade ... guess what? That is right! The usefulness of this card will go to crap!
Expect later in 2015 or 2016, Creative will try to improve their image by getting a pro-gamer to sign his name to yet another next generation sound card. Last sell-out gamer was Fatal1ty and Creative road that deal long and hard.
NEVER buy Creative's over-priced crap right before a new version of Windows comes out unless you are looking to get screwed. Creative is just gaming the stupid gamers. Johathan Wendel might be a good example of a stupid gamer but that does not mean the rest of us have to be.
I bought a Yeti some months back for the $100 you mention. I like it a lot. Running on a powered USB hub.
Now if I can just stop whistling letters, especially "s"...
I come here for the love
@echo off /D:123
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET PATH=C:\Windows;C:\
LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
I do not use onboard computer DACs. Never found one that I liked.
Yes I am insanely fussy about sound quality compared to most folks.
It used to be that I would get a sound card in order to get digital sound out. SPDIF so I could run it through a nice external DAC (typical good ones cost about $1K and up.).
Nowadays that isn't needed any more. Integrated sound almost always comes with SPDIF out, and most external DACs have USB capability. So I don't need sound cards to get the sound into my DAC these days.
Why run line level outputs to an amplifier when an optical link isolates the PC's noisy digital environment and puts a perfect digital signal into an AV receivers DSP and amplifiers.
As someone who's been on the audiophile ride from the early days of strange use of the PC speaker, and the first FM synthesis boards, I can say honestly say, a few things happened that made discrete audio hardware obsolete:
1. a basic DSP became widely available, to do audio processing
2. storage became vast enough, combined with audio compression, it made more sense to just pre-record all your audio effects and music and play them back through a basic DSP. I seen this shift in games through the years, from old school methods of creating sound effects and music with code, to just playing audio files included with your game.
3. the general purpose CPU became powerful enough to do any complex signal processing and simply use the basic DSP to output the results of the processing.
Basically, in my opinion, specialize hardware is useless in the face of vast storage and general purpose CPU processing. So a basic DSP is all ya gunna need and that's what basically every PC comes with, standard now.
I bought a SoundBlaster card for four-channel audio for my Mac >10 years ago. It did not work.
Cretive Labs' management clearly had decided to dump Macs, as months of emails with "we're trying to work on driver fixes, but, but, but," rang hollow.
I'm not worthy of your hardware, despite me giving you money? OK. Your choice.
Creative Labs has been dead to me for >10 years, and will remain so. I can get my A/D & D/A converters elsewhere, and I do. I program and use them, actually. And I teach University classes in the subject. Guess what provider never gets a mention.
Any company who gives a paying customer the middle finger deserves animosity, sharing of info with other consumers, and generally, well, eventually being overtaken by a business that provides what consumers pay them for.
Recommended for speedy removal.
I'm still using an AdLib!!
By the time I could afford a high-end card, age had dulled my hearing to the point that I couldn't tell the difference.... :-(
I thought you used them to build a cheap Oscilloscope...
http://makezine.com/2007/11/24/turn-your-soundcard-into-an-os/
http://www.newegg.com/Product/... and it just works in every system I tried. Sounds good too.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Integrated audio isn't good enough, isn't great, and isn't for me. I have a pro-level sound studio, and there's no way your going to tell me that the noisy environment that is the system motherboard is going to give me results I can be proud of. Not even for gaming, thanks.
Discreet card? Ok, maybe, but generally you need to jump up to RME or some such before you can really call it good. I have a an RME RayDAT - This means that that all my AD and DA happens somewhere else, and not in the computer. It all goes digital over ADAT to my mixer (a Yamaha DM2000) where the conversion happens. Or it goes digital over ethernet (audinate Dante) to an X32, again where the conversion happens.
There are a ton of good external boxes to handle sound - some quite reasonable. Stay away from the onboard and cheap USB sound dongles. If you have the speakers to handle it, then why put up with bad sound?
}#q NO CARRIER
... if Sound Blaster ZxR is really the best there is
I mean, are there any other discrete sound card which is more powerful / has better output than that Sound Blaster ZxR ?
Yes, I am in market for such a beast, money is no problem, as it's a company project
Any suggestion ?
I did a Google search for stereophile [plus] "Creative Labs." Several results came in for Stereophile Magazine. A cursory clicking on some links found some entries were from reviewers, some who said a Creative Labs product was slightly better that another product (no "this thing blew away the competition), some were reporting on news issues, such as some manufactures supporting such and such an approach or standard, and some were from readers. One was a comment to the effect that: a CD player, a basic integrated amp like a $200 NAD and some $200-ish speakers will sound much better than any computer based system.
end of counterpoint
I actually have a spare SB X-Fi that I havent' bothered to install in my most recent gaming PC re-build because it's just simply not worth the pain and suffering (and consumption of a slot). Audio wise, I can't really tell any difference.
Quality wise, I think there are minor gains. The biggest gains come from being able to drive nice/high quality headphones at the correct power levels so they sound as they should. Some motherboards can't supply enough power and the headphones sound... gross... because of it.
Also, you can gain a few FPS in some games by offloading the audio magic onto a card rather than do it on the CPU.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Have they fixed the BSOD issues yet? They had crappy drivers for over 10 years running. I haven't checked on them lately, but I assume they are bad as always.
I will never forgive Creative for what they did to Aureal.
PC sounds cards definitely sound worse. It took me a second to remember, and I wasn't sure at first. I always use my 24/96 interface with monitors, and they sound good, obviously there are clearer options out there. The sound card on my PC sounds good, too, though, and I don't mind listening with it if I'm just hearing some music or audio.
...and that's because the onboard audio component got fried.
Who made the card that I bought? I don't even remember. Some random company that put together essentially the same grade of components that mobo makers use.
Side note: the T-shirt I threw on tonight is from the release of the ESS AudioDrive, one of the first laptop audio chipsets to include SB compatibility mode.
Discrete audio cards are still necessary for radio-amateurs in digital modes (Weather fax, fldigi, pactor, AX25 packet-radio etc...). Typically, each radio is connected to your computer with two 3.5 mm audio jacks (Plus a serial RS232 interface for the push-to-talk). Therefore you need a separate audio cards for each of them, plus one for normal PC sound usage.
New radios tend to have a USB interface, but the older ones not, and they are often built to last 30 years.
Actually there may be some small reason to get back to 3D accelerated audio. If you want to go for extreme realism.
For example simulating each rain drop individually, each hitting a sound-polygon, such as a steal plate, grass, mud, water, concrete. The sound each drop makes reflected by other surfaces. The same for the wind, and other sounds.
You may be surprised what that amount of detail can do to enhance the realism.
I am about to buy an external audio device. To my knowledge, this is the best device you can get for a similar amount of money... you can spend a lot more money to get something about as good, or spend less money and get something worse.
The device is called an O2 amplifier plus ODAC. It was designed by someone who went by the name of "NwAvGuy".
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-vanished
The O2 is a really clean analog amplifier, and is actually open source hardware. You can get the parts list, order the parts yourself, solder everything together, and have your own O2. You can pair it with any DAC, but NwAvGuy also designed a DAC called the ODAC. He(?) said that he would have liked to make the DAC open source as well, but it wasn't practical.
I will buy mine from a company called JDS Labs. They sell a single nice integrated device with O2 and ODAC in one enclosure.
http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/
There are audiophiles who sneer at the O2 because it doesn't cost enough. At my previous job I spent hours listening to music on an O2 with Sennheiser 650 headphones, and I want to be able to listen to music with that level of quality again. I am willing to spend my own money to do it.
I thought about buying a really nice DAC but I always hesitated to spend the money because it can be hard to figure out what is worth the extra money, and what is just extra expense. I am friends with a world-class audio geek, and he agrees that this is a good quality audio device. If you want top quality and you are spending your own money, get or make an O2.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...but do not buy from Creative. They're overpriced crap with dubious driver support - the last card worth buying from them was maybe the AWE32? :)
Also, you need to have real speakers. And if you have a real amp to go with those speakers, it probably has SPDIF and you don't need a discrete sound card
Sadly, the competition (Asus Xonar for example) only cares about Windows as well, so they're out of the question.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Markets compete on quality until the cheap stuff becomes good enough; then they compete on reliability; ultimately they compete on price. So long as there's a market people will keep making expensive high-quality stuff, but they'll *never* be a part of the mainstream market again.
Well, I'm insignificant to statistics, but I do have (and use) 2 add-in cards in my gaming system (all others systems use onboard).
Reasons (1 for each):
1. Onboard sound circuit detects multiple headhpone connections/disconnection (multiple times/second, without having headphones....search Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H headphone problems)
2. I use virtualization for my gaming platform (Windows on Linux, with VT-d a.k.a. IOMMU for GPU, Sound, NIC, USB) and I need sound. (Warning: non-OP details following:) From 4 tested cards (+2 onboard +AMD5850 HDMI output), 2 of them work flawlessly (Xonar DGX/PCIe and Hercules Fortissimo IV/PCI) and Creatives are no-no (Audigy 2 and X-Fi Titanium PCIe...although the latter works pretty good in HDA emulation, without Creative drivers).
Bah! Get rid of that sound blaster crap, the Gravis Ultrasound is where it's at!
MODs sound so much better on a GUS
well at least nog to 99% of the people.. Most people can't hear the better sound anyway, they have 'crap' headphones (and no, those $200+ headphones don't make it any better).
For most people even the integrated soundcard itself really isn't the problem, but the speakers/receivers they use..
And soundquality is still in the eye of the beholder, some people like high pitched sounds better than low frequency or full bass.. it's all a personal taste..
Only real audiophiles will likely notice anything from a dedicated soundcard, but then again, there still is quite some difference between the integrated soundcards on motherboards..
At least the Adlib, Gravis Ultrasound, Soundblaster decision is a bit easier now...
Let's not forget that Adlib defined the standard we always chose in games, it was just SoundBlaster was compatible and cheaper/better.
Bit like IBM and countless other trail blazers. "Early bird may catch the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
Digital out is clearly better for sound than analogue. Optical does not have the bandwidth for HD audio, it is limited to 2.1 channels uncompressed. With HDMI you can output 8 raw PCM channels at 196khz sample rate. This means you can get full surround sound in games over the digital out without needing a DTS compression. So really HDMI is the only option for high quality sound, optical is okay if you only want stereo with a sumwoofer at 48khz, or only watch movies with pre compressed DTS or Dolby digital sound tracks which get 5.1 channels over optical by compressing into the same bandwidth as 2.1 raw PCM channels. The answer to your resolution problems is to use display-port which supports both digital audio and higher resolutions.
I have one desktop (ASUS P5K-e/WiFi) with integrated audio (ADI® AD1988B) throught a pair of logitech 2.1 speakers. I also have a PCMCIA Audigy 2 which I used with my laptop. Playing music through the ASUS integrated card was acceptable, but I remembered it clearer, so I bought a PCI to PCMCIA adapter and connected the Audigy 2. The difference was very pleasing. The music came out clearer. It may be just because of the codec, IDK, but there was a huge difference.
The laptop for which I had bought the Audigy was a HTPC and it was hooked up to an analogic Logitech 5.1 set. I made a new HTPC with an Asrock Z68M-ITX/HT (7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec)) and there was no way it would sound like the laptop used to. Even though it included a demo for a THX enhancer from Creative. I found an cheap Audigy FX and again the change was huge. My wife, who does not care too much about it told me it was like when I showed her the difference between a cheap set of Sony headphones and my Koss PortaPro (which is a rather inexpensive switch).
I don't consider myself by no means an audiophile, but I enjoy music a lot.
How about grahipcs cards ? Games excluded, will the on-board graphics be sufficient for everyday computing a few years from now.
The onboard sound card has ZERO effect on the quality of the audio. The bits are traveling directly, unmolested from the application generating them to the amplifiers in the speakers.
That's what I thought for a long time and then I discovered that I was wrong (so you are - no offence).
Digital sound can be altered on the way between application and the DAC interpretation, even with TosLink (optical).
Have a look about the clock jitter problem, or phase noise :
Some refs here (with more links inside), here, and here.
Tom's Hardware: "Anything Above $2 Buys More Features, Not Better Quality":
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733-19.html
Don't buy a card. Period. Get a decent USB I/O. That way you can use it anywhere and it doesn't have to be buried with your dead desktop.
Don't get me wrong, internal sound is actually not bad these days, but you never really know what you're getting and you might need to hack about with grounding for acceptable performance. (My current desktop is OK on output but terrible on input, even with hacks.) If you need something dependable, buy an external lump with known quality. I have a Roland Quad Capture I'm happy with.
SB16 was great but in the end, Creative exaggerated the benefits of their cards - to the extent of deception sometimes. And the drivers for some of the later models were somewhat dodgy so in the end its better that they're irrelevant now - they drove themselves into the ground.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Good news, you're $800 beats sound card will be on the market it no time, bad news it will only play sound lower than 200 Hz
For listening, forget buying a sound card. Get an external amplifier that takes S/PDIF input. That way, the on board soundcard is only doing the digital processing (2+2 is 4 no matter which chip does the processing), and the external amplifier does the analogue part.
A PC is full of digital noise, and analogue circuits pick up the noise. By putting the analogue part in its own case, outside the PC case, it will be shielded from the noise. Plus you can choose the quality of amplifier you want (and you get way more selection than from sound cards).
Now, if you are recording or doing other kinds of audio work (midi?), you probably want a real sound card. But then you'll want a pro one anyway, but these can be recognized by the whole sound card (or the analogue part anyway) being inside metal shielding - and by the way more than tree inputs/outputs. Some of them even have two parts, a PCI card that goes inside the computer, and an external part where you connect the cables. It is pretty hard to fit 8/16 or more stereo RCA connections on the back of a PCI card.
Is this what SD has come to? Thinly-veiled adverts. This is BS
It isn't the chipset, it is the power coming into the computer. To really open up the sound you need one of these $4500 babies: http://www.lessloss.com/firewa...
Get your ears tested before spending a lot of money on audio anything. I've always had good (not great) audio gear, always checking specs and getting the best I could afford and it always sounded good to me and all of my friends (or so they said).
Then I had my ears tested. My hearing is relatively flat all the way to 7.5Khz, then drops off a cliff. All of my flat 20-20K gear is totally wasted on me.
I can still hear noise and artifacts below 7.5Khz, so I still can't stand really cheap stuff, but I'm now saving some money as I replace gear as it breaks.
Bring back my beloved Audigy line.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'll see your dedicated audio card and raise you the AOpen AX4B 533 Tube!
http://www.maximumpc.com/artic...
Don't waste your time with a audio card, integrate a GD vacuum tube into your motherboard for the best integrated sound around! If you are an audio nut, nothing like going retro back to putting analog tubes into your digital computer! Time Travel to 2002 may be required however.
I never bought one, but I kind of wish I had just so I had one... maybe I can find a used one for cheap.... :)
If you ever wanted a company more hostile to Linux than nVidia, Creative is it. Their drivers are often 1-2 revisions of the hardware behind if creative botrhers supporting a card in the kernel at all. Their support forum is a hotbed of Microsoft fanbois and they refuse to answers questions about linux support. Take your dollars elsewhere.
I have an HT Omega Striker in my gaming/media PC and have it hooked up to my nice surround system. It does real-time 5.1 upmixing with fantastic results, taking 2 channel music and making it sounds 3 dimensional and full. It's to the point I'd rather hear it with the processing than just in regular old stereo or 2.1. It may not be audiophile purist, but damn it sounds impressive to me and to my discerning friends.
That being said, dealing with audio drivers in Windows is a huge hassle. I often have to uninstall and reinstall the drivers for windows to get it right.
As Moore's Law starts to hit a brick wall (a better analogy would be: stretching a strong rubber band; and it takes more and more force the more you stretch it), the amount of processing power you can cram onto a single IC die starts to hit an upper bound. The bounds that prevail upon it are primarily related to heat dissipation and power, both of which are available only up to a certain amount before they become impractical for the average (or even enthusiast) PC budget.
To put this another way: up until about Intel's Ivy Bridge generation, we could reliably expect very major CPU performance increases every 1-2 years. Now, the only way to see major CPU performance increases is to buy higher-TDP chips (like the -E variants, which have 6 cores and/or higher clocks and more cache, but are larger, more expensive die that produce more heat). If you asked Intel to print exactly the same size of silicon using exactly the same TDP with the three most recent architectures they've come up with, and you benchmarked these three CPUs with air-cooling, you would see only minimal improvement.
Where am I going with this? Well, sound takes a non-trivial amount of CPU to process. Complex sound, with many separate channels, positional audio effects, reverb, etc. takes even more CPU to process. So, to put it simply: if game developers want to continue to demand more CPU headroom to run their game/simulation (as AI algorithms get more advanced, more objects to keep track of, etc., CPU demands out of games are trending upwards), they aren't going to get that headroom from users who purchase "mainstream" processors. And the enthusiast processors are so expensive that only a small fraction of the market can afford them, which means it's impractical to set your system requirements for your game such that you can't play it smoothly without such a processor.
Where they CAN get that headroom, though, is by freeing up CPU resources by offloading sound processing onto a dedicated IC. By physically separating the sound processing from the CPU die, it's very similar to having a coprocessor (analogous to the GPU), allowing for much more complex sound-generation or sound-processing algorithms, without asking users to buy a $1000 CPU. And the best part is that a quite good sound card, like the SoundBlaster Z, with considerable offloading capability, can be purchased for under $100. That's well within any gamer's budget.
I don't know if I believe all the crock about the fidelity and the SNR and the "audible difference" between the DAC on a SoundBlaster and the DAC on a decent motherboard chipset. But I definitely believe that, if you want to have extremely high sound quality in your game, with dynamically generated effects in reaction to game events, this is going to chew up a lot of cycles from SOME processor. You get to choose whether those cycles come out of your CPU, or your sound card. Personally, I can't afford an i7-4960X, so I'll take the sound card any day of the week.
I find that for playback, especially with today's heavily-compressed media (in both senses - dynamic range compression AND lossy data compression), integrated audio is "good enough" for most people. Music, movies, web streaming and games usually sound just fine.
In fact, even if you're a music hobbyist, as long as your chipset has ASIO support you don't have that 200ms delay between pressing the key on your MIDI controller and the sounding of the note - that was the most annoying property of some of the earlier integrated chipsets for me.
However, for recording I've not yet found an integrated chipset yet that didn't suffer from the system electrical noise. Power fluctuations due to CPU activity and hard drive access produce a distinctive staticky sound in the recorded file if the input jack is not properly isolated, and I'm sure that the unshielded cables running from the front panel and the unshielded traces on the mainboard have a lot to do with the problem.
This AC shows the strangest lack of reading comprehension ever. I made no statements about tangibility of audio quality difference between semi-pro and pro equipments. I also made no claims comparing on-board audio and semi-pro gear. Chat bots are known to be able to spew out sentences that make sense on their own, but their responses do not show any comprehension of the context. Is Slashdot infested by chat bots these days?
I once had a signature.
I also am a fan of Klipsch. I bought a set of Klipsch pro-media computer speakers some 15 years ago and they are still going strong with daily use. As for the sound blaster, I actually have my speakers connected through an old one and my headphones through the on-board sound and swap the default sound output device between the two of them.
I had the same experience when shopping for usb sound cards - the market is flooded with cheap crap! However, I can't say enough good things about this product, the Griffin imic: http://www.amazon.com/Griffin-... I needed a solution for recording stereo line in, and most built-in cards no longer offer stereo line in (tin foil hat time: it's because of the riaa!). The imic is cheap compared to a pro audio interface, but has great features like a hardware switch for the mic pre, great linux/alsa support, it's reliable and easy to use, and sounds fine. I'm not an audiophile, and I'd like to echo many other sentiments on this thread that built-in sound cards usually sound 'good enough', however I use it primarily in the 'semi-pro' scenario of recording dj sets, which are primarily unbalanced stereo, and it performs well. I even use it to record live shows off the mixing board. So if you do a little research, there are still high-quality usb sound cards available.
After i started using spdif output to my high quality receiver, i forgot about sound cards and DAC's.
I get a lot of bleed between my headset's microphone and the speakers -- It's not so obvious when talking to friends on TeamSpeak or other VOIP, but when watching levels in any kind of audio program, it's fairly obvious.
There's also lots of bleed and distortion on audio routing applications like Virtual Audio Cable -- Are these problems caused by integrated sound, or poor applications/headsets?
I don't know what world you come from but where I live ... primarily in the workstation market ... there are still quite a lot of machines and motherboards that come without built in sound. In fact MOST of the even recent xeon dual and even single socket motherboards that I own require discrete sound cards if you actually want any audio at all ....
Sound cards were popular for a few reasons:
1. Many motherboards back then didn't have sound
2. Those that did required more CPU processing time which resulted in lower gaming multimedia performance, instead let an better optimized chipset dot he work
3. MIDI files were popular for games and music and the better the sound card the better the pre-recorded instrument library to play the mid music
4. Early 2000 onboard sound is good enough for most users but for encoding / decoding you need more horse power which you could get from sound cards
Today there is still a need for sound boards but usually for specialized applications. Your day to day user or gamer gets all the features he needs a decent onboard sound implementation. Buy a cheap board and get a cheap sound chipset (in most cases)
They're still worth the investment under certain circumstances.
The first one is the obvious one. The onboard sound fails or there is a problem with it. In my case I had to buy a cheap card since for some reason, the onboard sound wasn't compatible with Windows. It would play sound, but the line-input and the mic-inputs wouldn't work at all. At least under Windows. Under Ubuntu it worked fine, but the drivers from the manufacturer's website were rejected by Windows and the built-in ones only ran the sound output to the speakers.
Since I needed it to all work (was using a chat program when I was playing WoW), I had to buy an inexpensive sound card and disable the onboard to fix the problem.
The second one is also obvious. If you're doing something with audio on a professional level. Things like mixing or sound processing.
The third is a little less obvious and one of the reason that I want a high-end card. Since I don't buy Cable Television, I have a media-PC running things. It's the hub for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, as well as my Blu-Ray/DVD player. Since it's the hub of my multimedia system, I want it to run through some decent speakers and get reasonable sound. Since I'm in the IT industry, I can get a set of 7.1 speakers and a Creative Labs card for less than I could get a decent surround system at Walmart, Target or Best Buy.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Most people are idiots.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829156001
This product allowed you to convert all audio into dts 7.1 and use only an optical cable to your stereo.
Real time encoding over toslink is the only way to get pc games working well on decent sound systems.
note: it is no longer available because of the first statement.
The only way to do this now is with a card or motherboard that supports DTS connect.
Soundblaster lies hardly any of these work correctly...DD passthrough is not DTS connect.
http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=68520
Not to mention that they dropped driver support from the SBLive 5.1/Gold after XP, despite it being a *very* common card in many systems (partly, I believe, because it came with many Dell's and/or possibly HP's).
When Vista/7 came out, Creative dropped it like a hot rock and didn't provide a driver for the newer OS. There is a FOSS driver, but it lacked much of what was supported in the XP driver (while also adding other features).
I have an SBLive sound card. Loved it for years. Defended it and all of its virtues (hardware mixing! oh, emm, gee!). Then I had to upgrade my motherboard and found that PCI is "old tech", so that card hasn't been used since then. I'm not enough of an audiophile to care (yes, it *was* better than the onboard Realtek stuff I have now) to buy a card which costs about as much as my graphics card (which provides a lot more bang for the buck) just so that I can throw it away when AMR is not the new hot shit any more.
I'd be more inclined for something USB but my experiences there have been less than stellar and posters higher up can back me up -- a lot of USB sound solutions out there are crappy-poop.
"While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR"
well if more people had actual audio hardware, it would be an incentive for game developers to start using DSP for more immersive environments, i'm willing to bet a whole heap of money that once VR takes off onboard audio will be less and less useful. so yes for now there is no performance difference, but wait untill things like occlusion, reflection, room modelling, HRTF and whatnot all start becoming normal in VR.
onboard is good.
can discrete be better? yes.
will you hear a difference? depends on your hardware / setup and the individual person. that's all there is to it.
anything else is just an egotist claiming golden ears or a thrifty neckbeard thinking he's so above the "idiots with loose pockets".
ps take all anecdotes with a grain of salt... some people cant discern 1080p over 720p; if you can discern, you'd do yourself an injustice listening to those people.
You don't need a separate sound card to output digital, since the sound card won't be doing the DAC anyway. The only need for a discrete card is for having analog output directly from the back of the computer. In that case, what utter moron thinks a card with ZERO analog components is going to be good at outputting analog audio? Headphone amplifier my ass.
Most people won't need a separate sound card or external interface for playback of music, movies, or game sounds. Audiophiles with high quality speakers or headphones can still benefit from a good DAC (digital to analog converter). People who want to play surround sound from a laptop may also benefit if they are using a receiver or speaker system that only has analog surround inputs, or if they have an older laptop with no HDMI port.
In a current home theater setup you're likely to be sending sound to the receiver via HDMI. In that setup a separate sound card will give you no quality benefit, because the DAC is in the receiver rather than the computer. HDMI also eliminates the need for multichannel analog audio outputs, which laptops rarely have.
Recording is another matter entirely. Laptops typically only have a mono microphone input. Desktop systems usually have a stereo line in, but even that is not enough channels for many recording scenarios. Onboard ADCs (analog to digital converter) are usually low quality and suffer from high levels of noise, in part because of having to exist inside the electrically noisy computer enclosure. A quality recording interface will let you make much better recordings. The best ones are found in music stores (either brick and mortar or online) or from specialty manufacturers online, not in computer stores, though a Sound Blaster is significantly better than most onboard audio. Special audiophile motherboards may be an exception; those use better converters and pay attention to filtering and shielding.
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disable on-board sound in BIOS, reboot.
Many years ago, I joined a group of audiophile students at my university and we were building a pair of two-way loudspeakers with semi-expensive chassis. Students' budget, but it still had potential. When experimenting with crossover components, we soldered things together at first, then someone had the idea to use alligator clips (two each connected by a cable soldered to the clips) for faster turnaround.
The sound quality, which had been quite good up to that point, suddenly dropped to that of a cheap speaker from some supermarket. The ohmic resistance of the cable between the alligator clips was IMHO too low to have much of an influence.
Conclusion: :-)
It must have been the alligator clips, and good contacts matter. Since that experience I like to use gold-plated connectors, but with standard cables to connect them. That combination tends to be cheap enough and works for me
C - the footgun of programming languages
Don't mind me - I'm still sore that PC MIDI has all but been abandoned, particularly Yamaha's XG chipset. DAWs are all good, but none of the "modern" compositional tools are nearly as elegant as the ol' channel-voice-'n-staff getup.
it will play dsd and flac files. it has 32bit saber dacs and will decode just about any disc you throw at it it can read files on usb attatched hard drives or audio from a computer. its the quality of the cfiles that matter.onboard audio is fine for mp3 but not high res audio.try a good amp and martin logan electrostats, you will be amazed at what you have been missing.
Creative Labs owns Emu and Ensoniq, not Korg. There are no CL chips in any Korg products.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.