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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.
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
I'm still bitter about Aureal.
Why not just turn off your speakers? Every mobo comes with built-in audio these days anyway, doesn't mean you have to plug anything in to it.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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. :)
Citation: http://www.wired.com/2008/03/c...
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
...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
He probably used oxygen free cables for the second part and just forgot about it.
I think "performance" might be referring to framerate (i.e., a measure of how CPU-intensive it is to drive the onboard vs. dedicated card), whereas audio quality is considered separately. Not the best writing, I'll agree...
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.
"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.
Why bother? you cannot dismiss the hardware in the middle that GENERATES the audio... if your integrated hardware is poor -- your quality receiver amplifies poor quality audio.
HDMI can output DIGITAL Audio. MS has very good digital audio software mixing and playback algorithms. And many games use a library like FMOD which does software mixing and a DAC output anyhow.
You really only need to worry about a sound card if your PC is outputting ANALOG audio to HIGH QUALITY Amp & Speakers.
2001 would have been before the capacitor plague hit hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
If you look down to the industrial espionage part, I heard the story a little different. Instead of a worker stealing the recipe and copying it wrong, I heard there was a hacking incident and sabotages files were purposely placed in the areas the hackers were looking at. The faulty electrolyte recipe was supposedly on of them and they used it to pinpoint which manufacturer was trying to steal information. But that could have just been rumor.
A quick glance over at Newegg would throw into question your statement that "most intel/amd sound chips don't support high range, 5.1 or 7.1 surround". Supporting 5.1 & 7.1 surround are de rigeur on even the low end motherboards that are available. As far as "high range", if you don't define it, I guess we don't know if they support it.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.
John
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...
If you're an audiophile, you're probably using USB audio or S/PDIF, which don't need a discrete sound card, paired with an external DAC worth many times the price of a Creative soundcard and without the extraneous bells and whistles. If you're a gamer, you're on a headset, often again USB. If you're an average user, your speakers are too crappy to notice the difference.
As far as I can tell, the only use case that truly benefits from a discrete card is 5.1+ surround systems which support the latest Dolby/DTS techs, as those often aren't supported by onboard sound.
I never really liked USB for sound. Might be another old habit too.
The problem as it was last time I messed with it was that USB power would start causing issues when you chained more devices to it. It was important to make sure you used powered hubs if connecting something (several devices) with more power consumption than a mouse or keyboard.
Perhaps I should give it another look. It's been a while.
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.
Strong caution with USB audio. There is a metric buttload of cheap USB adapters, While they technically work, they typically lack analog filtering that gets rid of higher harmonics. If you look at the output on an oscilloscope, instead of a smooth wave, you see the actual steps. Better audio hardware should have filters to smooth this stuff out.
Another MAJOR thing is inducing noise into the output. This is not just for USB cards, but all audio solutions. You need some pretty good filtering between the digital and analog power domains -- yet another area where cheap sound can skimp. Hey, let's shave $0.05 off by dropping this capacitor and inductor!
The original article really touches on two separate areas:
1) Audio processing
2) Higher quality audio circuitry
SoundBlaster (and other gaming-oriented cards) typically do both. However, do you really NEED both? The audio processing stuff is supposed to provide an API that games can use to make thing sound more realistic, or offload audio processing from software to hardware, or both. It can typically decode various dolby flavors, and do some other fancy DSP-ish type stuff. Do you really NEED all of that? If so, then maybe a gaming card is for you.
However, what if you want the best sound possible, the lowest noise possible, and don't really game or use the various audio enhancements? You just want a plain-vanilla sound card, but with the highest quality audio. Where to do? Skip the computer store, but go to your local MUSIC store (not the ones that sell CD's, the ones that sell GUITARS). Those cards skip all of the DSP bells and whistles, but have the best-quality DACs and filtering that you can find. You can find some really good USB solutions that will blow on-board audio out of the water for about $100 or so. Of course, you can go crazy and spend $500 or more if you want. If it is good enough for a music producer to use in a studio (who makes his or her living off of the sound), it is probably good enough for YOUR music and movies.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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
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.
With the amount of porn I consume, a discreet audio card is critical.
Ah so that's how they light up modern see through cases.
They use vacuum tubes in the sound cards to light up the motherboards.
And in a day someone will have built it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Everybody listen to Harrkev.
Working as an audio professional, and electrical design hobbyist who has designed many audio circuits, I agree 100% with his statements.
USB in particular is some noisy shite if it's not done properly and corners are cut, it can also be really great for the price if done right.
And yes, spending $100 on a used pro audio interface at a music shop can get you the quality of a brand new $500 interface if you know whats what.
Take it from someone who has tried to use 30 USB devices on one PC (bitcoin mining): It doesn't work like you'd expect.
USB hubs are usually designed far below the spec because the assumption is that most people won't connect more than 2 or 3 devices at a time.
If you connect 20 to 30 devices they start to fail randomly.
Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.
Old and busted. I don't know how you can tolerate listening to the harshness and small sound stage caused by RF shielded optical fiber interconnects that aren't impedance matched as well.
And all those stories are bullshit.
The simple answer is the electrolyte that failed was simply cheaper to produce. Most of the product failed out of warranty so it was never an issue for the capacitor producer. The good stuff, tantalum, is actually a conflict mineral (meaning the mine's production is used by non-state entities to fund nearly endless war often over control of the mine) and is super expensive in comparison to the dirt cheap (fails in 6months to 3 years) stuff they used. Don't attribute this to malice or sneaky corporate espionage when the simplest answer is that someone made more money using substandard product. Because that's the reality, some Chinese capacitor company laughed all the way to the bank then reincorporated 3 years later under a different name. Nearly a billion dollars in electronics were ruined by some guy trying to make extra money and the companies you purchased from didn't care.
I thought you used them to build a cheap Oscilloscope...
http://makezine.com/2007/11/24/turn-your-soundcard-into-an-os/
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
Not sure if they make any now, but Aopen used to make a motherboard with vacuum tubes for sound:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Artic...
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);
USB ports these days have to cope with charging smartphones. There's a port on my motherboard that can put out almost 1.5 amps if it's in charging mode.
Unpowered USB hubs still split the power they get from the system between attached devices, of course. They can't give more power than they get.
There's no need to spend that much. A lot of motherboards have S/PDIF outputs, and with a good coax/TOSLINK DAC (like the ~$40 FiiO D3), pristine noise-free stereo sound is both easier and cheaper than buying an expensive sound card.
Eat the rich.
Onboard sound sucks.
No, onboard analog outputs suck. By using a digital connection such as USB (or S/PDIF, Firewire, Thunderbolt, HDMI, DisplayPort etc.), you're passing a digital bitstream and moving the digital to analog conversion to an external device that usually has a much better signal/noise ratio.
Even the cheapest onboard sound chipsets can pass a perfect digital bitstream along via S/PDIF, even if the analog components are shit.
Eat the rich.
Meanwhile, other game developers have stated that discrete soundcards just don't matter in terms of performance. A lot of the game developers need to do special processing on the audio files in the CPU before handing them off to the sound system to be played. Because the Windows API doesn't allow them to do that special processing on the card (and nobody wants to go back to the days of supporting a dozen different cards).
The "advanced functionality" of the add-in cards is mostly mythical these days, hardly any developers are willing to jump through the hoops to support it.
(It used to be true that your PC would offload a lot of the audio work to the soundcard, lessening the demand on the CPU. But that is no longer true.)
So these days, it boils down to whether the add-in cards have better S/N ratios for your analog speaker / headphone / microphone jacks, or work better with whatever you are outputting audio to then the built-in solution. And while I'm a happy ASUS Xonar user, I feel that built-in audio on most motherboards is good enough for most of the time, so it's a shrinking market. I don't even recommend an add-in card unless there is evidence that the on-board audio is just pure shite.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
There's no need to spend that much. A lot of motherboards have S/PDIF outputs, and with a good coax/TOSLINK DAC (like the ~$40 FiiO D3), pristine noise-free stereo sound is both easier and cheaper than buying an expensive sound card.
Or even with a cheap shitty coax cable like the one that you got for free in your wheaties 20 years ago to connect your VCR to your TV. Its a digital signal after all - communication either works or it doesn't.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!