[YT] Why Nobody Buys Sound Cards Anymore?

It is true that onboard sound has come long , long ways. But in my opinion nothing can replace a good dedicated sound card.

 

Except better external hardware. Stop with soundcards and just pipe the audio out via digital to a great AV receiver or decoder amp.

 

Can anyone recommend a good set of speakers/decoder amp whatever for PC that doesn't cost a bomb? Used to have a SoundBlaster Z which was pretty good but got rid of it a long time ago after switching to Linux (Creative didn't supply any drivers and the Open Source implementation was crap)

 

The best I'll always personally remember, 1999 Aureal Vortex 3D. Still have that card in storage. Damn did that card sound awesome with Half - Life.


I had two Creative SB Live! cards but it's honestly so long ago I cannot remember what they sounded like. They're in storage as well.

SoundStorm in nForce 1 and 2, damn they were great Asus Deluxe and Abit nF7-S rev2.0.

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. I remember many great times with that for Battlefield 2 but sadly I also cannot remember what it sounds like. Still have the card.

Then came along the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. What a card in Sound Creation mode with bit-matched playback. Even for gaming.

Then I jumped to the Creative Sound Blaster AE-5, personally I couldn't tell a great deal of difference between the AE-5 and Prelude with the AKG K702. The AE-5 I think had slightly better lower bass to 10Hz?

I still have a soft spot for the Prelude.

Then it all had me thinking this for the future?

 

You may want to consider a USB soundcard. Usually they don't need specialized drivers to work, and there's the SBX G6 with the same DAC as the AE-5. Also, you can move it between machines in case you'd like to use it on a Windows platform.

I have a SB X-Fi USB HD, and it's plug and play on Linux. (Windows too)

 

Since sound processing has been shoved on the CPU instead of APU and Vista made DirectSound etc unavailable, I can understand people just used on-board.
I have used the X-Fi Xtreme music and later the Prelude and yes, I miss the factor of having a company putting energy into special audio effects.
All we do now, is just making it sound better with better DAC/ADC/OpArms and Japanese caps. But the processing is a bit at a stand-still, I think.

I have heard demo's of the upcoming SteamAudio and other Ray-traced audio systems and they do sound awesome, but we still have to hope that games will fully support that engine when it comes out.

For now, I've gotten rid of my add-in audio cards ( last was a Asus essence one STX ). Got myself a Audeze Mobius now.
Nice surround and best sounding headphones I've ever had. And I had a Beyer MMX300 connected to that Asus card, previously .

On the other hand... I do remmeber EAX as just a lot of reverb, though.
-strokes his Vortex2-

 

I think I vaguely remember EAX on XP. I kept it off as I thought it was horrid.

I did dig out the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS from 2003? with DanielK's drivers. The sound card seems pretty clean sounding compared to the Prelude on Windows 7 with the AKG K702 and SMSL sApii Pro AMP. It seems to have a lower noise floor compared to the Prelude...

There are subtle differences between the Audigy 2 ZS, Prelude and AE-5 but they all more or less sound identical.
I was even testing the Audigy 2 ZS in Quake Champions and CS:GO in stereo, the directional sound was great. The mid range seems a tiny bit lower on the Prelude.


Then I found an old thread on Tomshardware that I thought was interesting...

 

It was stuff nobody asked for though. When I got a SB Live "something" (I can't even remember what model it was) to get this "EAX Advanced HD" thing with "EAX 5" and whatnot, every game I tried that advertised it just had weird sound, just to make use of it.

The last time I remember where processing on a sound card was beneficial, was in the 90s, in DOS games that properly supported the Gravis Ultrasound cards. With a 386 or 486 PC of the time, audio mixing and resampling on the CPU had a negative impact on frame rate. The Ultrasound had a resampler and mixer chip. You got a tangible FPS boost and/or much higher audio quality (because the CPU-based processing was using the crappiest quality possible to reduce CPU load.) But very few games supported that anyway, as the vast majority of people had soundblaster cards that had no hardware processing whatsoever.

Then the Pentium came along and this became mostly moot anyway, and when SSE CPUs became standard in the early 2000's, there was zero reason for hardware sound processing. Which is when Creative decided to do hardware processing... No wonder so many people associate Creative with snake oil. When it was actually needed, they didn't do it. When it became trivial and irrelevant, only then did they try to sell it to us.

 

Turtle Beach? What new sound cards? Creative labs.. what new sound cards? Looked up how they were doing 1-2 years ago compared to now have we? What NEW sound cards are there? Now if talking MUSIC then Yamaha is doing good.

The question was sound cards. Not some CHIP in some headphones. That are USB and most are just 16bit. Which for what they are made for are great.

If your just some gamer then duh the onboard sound is AWSOME.. has awesome specs. My guess is no demand. You cant well you could lol plug in that MT32 and play some games.

 

Depends on his/her use. Gaming and even music wise, a decent USB headphones like the ones I recommended are a viable option. The in-headphone DAC processes 24/192 native, FYI. If you know Audeze, you know what I'm talking about.
To be fair, except for Audeze Mobius, I don't know or many decent USB headphones.

SoundCARD wise, Turtle beach and Creative were never a considered brand in the music industry, so please don't compare to Yamaha or Roland. For general use Creative and ASUS are pretty nice, you just won't gain a lot compared to modern onboard on high end motherboards.
If one feels particularly creative ( no pun intended ), one could try buying any old Auzentech, Creative of ASUS Xonar and mod the hell out of it with new DACs, opamps and capacitor batteries.

External setup wise, Shiit is a very capable brand. Gaming wise, ASUS and Creative have their ( also mod-able ) external DACs, but again... the music oriented brand will most probably sound better to you. These are mostly intended for headphone use, but are certainly decent for speakers as well.
Hell, you want purely speakers? Try decent active speakers with digital input, either USB or S/PDIF. I'm not very into speakers and surround setups, so I can't recommend a brand/model here.

MaxBlade, do you have recommendations, or do you stop at critics?

We asked for it, but Creative didn't deliver. We got a taste of what A3D could do for you. The audio projection was superb for it's time.
Creative swallowed Aureal and A3D was shelved and doomed. It might very well be that the Virtualization Creative used later on on the X-Fi and later card was modified A3D tech, who knows?
But by then it was too late.

The first in-game software audio engine that blew my socks off was the Miles audio engine used in Half-Life 2.
I couldn't believe what I heard back then ^^. I thought it was my X-Fi, but nope, it was all software, done by CPU.

From then on, yeah, one can say audio processing by dedicated processor was wasted.

I have the idea that the sound quality has improved a lot, but the processing hasn't. Too much emphasis on visuals.
Ray-Traced sound is something I'm very curious about. Can't wait. Sound engineers and composers will have their hands full trying to fully utilize that tech ^^.

Also, I applaud the day we have in-game sound files matching the capacities of the DAC/OpAmp quality wise. 24/96 would be nice .


Vf, I shall have to try that Audigy 2 for my retro setup . I wan't financially capable of getting one back when that launched.

 

Nah, that's a complete waste. Just marketing BS. 16/48 is already perfect for playback. 24/96 is only useful when working on the audio. When shipping the final audio files, converting to 16/48 is perfectly fine and there's nothing to be gained by using a higher bit depth or sample rate.

Monty from xiph.org has been debunking the "HD audio" myth for a while now.

You will see 24/96 or 24/192, and recently even 32/384 being put on sound cards as a feature. Unless you're an audio producer, they are completely useless.

 

Oh, that article. Yeah.
Exactly the reason why I went with my current setup instead of that 32bit Creative card.
I'll still hold on to that 24bit placebo though. It makes me feel good, since it's a placebo .

I'm guilty of buying 24bit/96Khz kit and tracks, even if I know it won't sound better because of it. I even own a 2nd hand SACD player and the full 2 SACDs -schmirk-
I just hope it was copied from a better master source, which usually it seems that way.

So then, what DO we want in games? Better compression with least possible data loss? Better dynamic range? Better simulation?

 

32-bit allows better digital volume control.

 

Since when receivers produce high quality audio with hdmi/optical/coaxial? I am crying from laughter.

I choose my expensive 3.5mm cables for multichannel passthrough from my SBAE5 anytime. Really.

Every game is much more alive in comparison to my gpu - yamaha receiver input or realtek's output.

 

When they have a good DAC. If the receiver's DAC is better or the same as the one in the PC, then a digital connection is preferable.

 

As an some kind of audiophile, sound card is MUCH better than those realtek on board audio.

Had the STX II till it died, now have the Creative AE5, and it sounds much better than onboard, better soundstage, channel separation, software.

And yeah , i use the analog output for my speaker, as well the build in headphones DAC with mine AudioTechnica E70.

 

Mixing and attenuation in Windows is done in 32-bit floating point anyway. If hardware volume is changed, the DAC of the sound card doesn't care about bit depth. It does volume control in whatever resolution it supports, regardless of whether you're using 16, 24 or 32 bit. Many 24-bit DACs for example only do 16-bit volume control.

 

With AE-5 Windows doesn't do the volume control but the Sabre DAC does (at 32-bit). Handy because volume control will work even when using direct mode and wasapi exclusive. ESS's volume control is clearly superior to the SoundCore3D volume control (on Zx for example).

But still, the point was that generally speaking the the point of high precision is that you can do things like digital volume control for 16-bit content losslessly to a point really nicely.

 

Onboard audio is trash and always has been imo, my mobo has a realtek solution which is totally crap

I use a sb audigy 2 which has way superior bass and highs than the onboard could do

 

When your receiver has a superior DAC and audio circuit. I have a lovely and somewhat venerable Yamaha that came with the top-of-line Burr-Brown DAC (-126db SNR) that has a fantastic headphone port for driving my HD580's. Very low noise floor, very clean and articulate, with plenty of juice to drive them with impact.

Also very good for my 5.1 Infinity Primus 150/250 setup w/ DIY sub.

Mind you that later revisions of that series moved the hi-end DAC to the 10xx series. So you need to dig into the quality of the components (DAC, amp, power to external speakers and for the headphone port, etc) before you can say a soundcard would do better.