Anybody still use add in sound cards

[paperfist]

Thunderbolt has definitely opened up a plethora of interface options!
Finally replaced our firewire MOTU devices with Apogee Ensembles.
Onboard audio is full of noise, distortion and other bad things and most products with the name "Creative" in them are not much better particularly when dealing with drivers and i/o. The USB sound blaster is actually pretty decent though. But it lacks proper balanced outputs.

That's a $2500 'sound card'?

 

[Chaotic42]

That's a $2500 'sound card'?

IIRC she works with audio professionally. When I was in radio we used some ridiculously pricey ISA sound cards. This was in 2003.

 

[darkswordsman17]

For VR, an upgraded Aureal Vortex sound card would be nice. I remember playing Unreal Tournament with positional audio, it was amazing!

Positional audio is baked into game engines and even APIs now, so no real need for a dedicated sound processor for that.

Pretty sure Oculus (and I know its been said by quite a few) said that positional audio is very important to getting VR right (and hence why they felt it was an absolute need to include ok quality headphones on the Rift, even if they knew most of the people willing to put money down on it would likely already or also spend money on even better audio, they wanted developers to make it a point to work on).

If you're a pro doing sound recording/producing for records or movies or whatever, then you definitely need a discreet card.

For all other purposes, you don't need one. Mainstream Mobos, even under 100 bucks, come with very capable 7.1 chips on them. If you need anything more than that for games, then you are deluding yourself into thinking you need to spend more money for no reason whatsoever. I mean, it's totally fine if you want to do that, just don't try to convince anyone with common sense that you are gaining any benefit from games with your discreet SoundBlaster....or whoever makes them now.

I last put one in a machine, c. 2003.

You'll need more than a card for that. I don't know if anyone even makes internal pro level cards any more since its such a niche market and you'll have to do breakout boxes for the interfaces anyway so it just makes sense to get it outside the PC case (which brings benefits). I think a lot of the processing/mixing is handled in software now though, and so a lot of the mixers and things is more about the quality of the DACs/ADCs and interfaces (like USB, plus the physical connectors that you're connecting equipment with, and also the buttons/sliders/knobs). We're at the point where the synthesizers, mixers, MIDI sounds, etc aren't limited by the processors in your equipment. Of course plenty of people do seek out synths and things, but its not a need for even good production and is more about other factors (much like how we absolutely have trounced vinyl in fidelity but people still enjoy it for various things).

For games, you don't need an actual sound processor at all any more, as game audio is pretty much all software. You just need something that handles the input/output. If you want more features (simulated surround modes, etc) that's possible (but even integrated audio features plenty of those features so a dedicated card isn't necessary). I don't even think having a dedicated card even improves performance (as in framerates in the game, not fidelity) any more.

One aspect that sound cards have a leg up on DACs is that DACs generally are one sided and just receive input. So if you want to manage your microphone input (like if you stream or do podcasts), but even then integrated has those features, and if you want quality you're better off separating things. You can get ok quality USB mics for instance.

It is not all about gaming with games that use software audio positioning, it is about sound quality and extra features that come with these cards.

we've had this conversation before, several times .. it always ends in a -storm between people who say dedicated sounds better (and also throwing in a ton of technical reasons most of which are wrong and some which are right yet irrelevant) and people who understand audio. the correct answer is: use it if it makes you feel better.

Dedicated is almost always better. Integrated is often good enough, but objectively you'll almost in absolution get better sound from dedicated. I'm not really sure what technical reasons they'd be wrong about? You're right that because audio on computers is now pretty much all software driven (even the stuff that Creative does is software, they just write it for certain hardware to handle the processing, but pretty much no games really make use of specific hardware processing any more like back when games would have to do licensing deals to use EAX and stuff, which of course generally required certain Creative cards), so the sound processing aspect of a card is largely irrelevant. But the DAC and analog output makes a difference.

Another thing to keep in mind is most of the specs touted, are basically the max tested specs of the chip (so like a DAC, the SNR, channel separation, etc), but the implementation makes a lot of difference so you'll likely not reach those levels. I don't know of any great source for real comprehensive testing and comparison (quite a few places have done some limited testing).

And sure there's still some preferences (its not unheard of for people to prefer an objectively lower fidelity sound for different reasons, i.e. the way it distorts sounds good to them).

Question: The HD 598s can be had for $150 versus $320 for the HD600s and $315 for the HD650s. What is the "sound quality" difference in these earphones assuming they are being run with decent equipment? Would one be better served getting the cheaper 598s and spending $150 on a decent DAC/amp or would you get better sound quality from the 600s and using the amp from a Xonar sound card? I understand that a lot of this is subjective but if you could use something like percentages to quantify, like you did with the price difference, that would be very helpful. Thanks.

The 600s are in a league above the 598s. You should see if Massdrop is going to do another Sennheiser version, they had I believe an HD-650 for like $250 not too long ago (and it seems like those do well enough that they often do more runs, I think AKG has had a version of the K70x line on there several times already).

If you already have the Xonar, then I'd definitely say the 600s or 650s, as ASUS was putting an amplifier (its that T.I. chip, but its pretty decent) on their cards and it seemed to be thought to be a good fit with the 6xx Sennheisers. A $150 DAC/amp is going to be compromised in some manner and won't absolutely trump the Xonar (whilst likely using similar level of chips). There might be other reasons (if you want a volume knob you can physically control for instance), but you'll get a bigger upgrade from the better headphones than from the lower ones and low end DAC/amp.

That's not to say lowend DAC/amps are junk, there's plenty of decent ones. I just don't think you're likely to exceed the Xonar by enough. Maybe, somes of Schitt's stuff (and I think there's some others that could compete) that could be noticeably better and not too expensive. Unfortunately sometimes you can buy new gear and like its not as much. So generally, I say focus on the speakers, see how it sounds, and then (unless it specifically is not going to sound appealing, like if you bought something that has lots of bass but don't like bass, or something) improve from there with equipment that should work well with it (so like an amp that's suited for handling that load).

Oh and if you don't have the Xonar already, I'd still say go for the higher end headphones. And then save up and buy someone's used DAC/amp.

I'm currently using the onboard. I've always used a SoundBlaster in my rig until a couple of years ago when I went through two of them within a couple of months. I'm sure I just got a bad run of them. I haven't upgraded to the newer SoundBlasters yet as I just haven't sat down to look at what I really wanted. It does feel odd not to have a SoundBlaster something or another in my machine though. I was such a fanboy of them in the 90s. It's a bit depressing to see how far they've fallen, as at one point you said sound for a computer and it was a SoundBlaster (or a really sad knock off that claimed to be 100% SoundBlaster compatible). I really thought when they started doing nvidia based video cards they were going to expand into a much larger company.

That's actually not a bad thing though. Creative were dicks and made gaming audio worse by dominating it and then litigating a company that actually was innovating out of business and then using patents to keep game companies from doing their own (see the Doom 3 situation where id/Carmack wrote their own positional audio but Creative had patents that basically forced id to license with Creative or delay the game to remove it). Some of the blame might should fall on Microsoft for that situation being like that in the first place, but at least they eventually changed it and effectively smashed Creative's stranglehold (starting with Vista). Funny thing is, Creative actually kinda still has a lot of power as they basically control OpenAL, which I believe is pretty widely used in games (doesn't seem to be that prevalent, its in some big name games, but not that many of the past few years unless they just haven't been updating them; I wonder if Creative making it proprietary had something to do with that...).

Didn't Creative used to have their own graphics processor? This was in like the 90s, back when there was the whole mess of different cards (before Nvidia and AMD basically won out with their 3D GPUs). Maybe they just had versions using other companies's chips, but it was before they made Nvidia cards (which I don't think ever got off the ground, can't recall why, wonder if Nvidia touting using GPUs to do 3D audio processing was part of that), so that was actually like them giving up on their own to hock one of their competitors wares. They were aimed at the pro market (like CAD stuff, but again, I think this was back in the mess of Glide/OpenGL/etc days).

Guess it wasn't that long ago (but Creative bought them in 2002, so maybe I'm thinking more about them from the 90s)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dlabs

Sound cards were obviously a necessity back in the days of early computing but in recent years with the technology of integrated sound circuits improving , the add in board is less an improvement. I found that for middle of the road sound quality, the bigger improvement came not from an improved dac but better speakers/headphones. I went from a sound blaster to on-board without a twitch but had my personal safe space exploded by a set of 2.1 high end speakers.

Yeah, its kinda like how we went from having 256 colors to now we're talking about 10-bit colorspaces, where we've been at a "good enough" baseline for a while, and there have been steady advances in quality since. DAC chips across the board are solid enough (that the implementation, namely the power regulation and analog parts) matter basically more than the chip you use. But its also quite easy to do a solid implementation.

That was the same for me. I dabbled in headphones but was kinda locked into a "I can't fathom spending that much on higher end ones" for years so mostly just tried out a bunch of mid-fi ones, and then on a whim bought a higher end pair and plugged it right into the headphone jack on a mid-2000s Dell laptop and was blown away. Some of that has been tempered with time (I think there's headphones selling at what those mid-fi ones used to that beat the high end ones that blew me away at the time), but in my experience that's the way to go is figure out the speakers then work back from there. I would throw in the caveat to try as much different ones as you can, and also if possible try to get a taste of "proper" setups for them as it will give you an idea of if the cost of getting them there is worth the sound or not.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I didn't realize that you needed that much power to drive high end headphones.

I currently use the old Logitech x530s. They get the job done.

Its a mix, but headphones, have a lot of variety in the loads they present an amplifier. Low/mid/high impedeance (some headphones are almost speaker low, with a lot of IEMs being in the 10-20ohm range, while there being some that are 600ohm, but that's not the only thing to take into account). There's a variety of types of speakers (balanced armatures, dyanamic, orthos, electrostats, hybrids, and probably several others I'm forgetting).

I use the onboard audio on my ASROCK H97 Pro4 - alc892 codec with ELNA caps. The sound difference from a plain alc892 board was remarkable. Much more clear and crisp.

I use the Logitech Z640 speaker set.

Implementation matters a lot. Higher end boards these days tend to use both better chips and caps and things, as well as isolating the audio components. That's not to say that will make them sound good (as other factors come into play, like power supply).

I have a dedicated card (that isn't shielded at all, despite them trying to make it seem like it is by putting a plastic shroud over it), and the noise it picks up from the PC is very noticeable through headphones (when silent, generally its not noticeable at all when there's actual audio signal, even when the song or movie is basically dead silent I don't hear the PC noise, but if I pause it it is immediately discernible). And even boards where they "isolate" the components are not isolated that much even (their isolation is basically just putting them all on the edge and not running traces for other components through the PCB in that section).

I have a ZxR in one rig, and an onboard in another. The ZxR sounds better, at least with 250 ohm headphones..

I'm kind of annoyed that there is a shortage of DTX motherboards, because my ideal setup would be one high end GPU in slot #2, with a dedicated sound card in slot #1. But instead I'm toying with the idea of giving up dedicated sound to go SFF. I like a 6700K + TXP setup, but the sound quality is just very meh on it compared to my ATX build which has the ZxR.

For a PC, I actually would prefer an external box anyway. Its nicer for headphones, and having a volume knob is great. Another reason is knowing that I could max the software volume in Windows (and thus should make sure that its outputting at the bitrate it should be capable of, if given that quality of signal of course). But this way I can get the noisy computer farther away.

Maybe it's my 2010 mobo's onboard sound, but I tried it and I could tell the difference between a Creative X-fi with music and a $700 receiver + bookshelf system. The onboard sounded muddled or flat. For games, I could give less of a shit, my volume is usually set very low for games and onboard with definitely be sufficient.

I don't get the $300 sound cards though... My current X-fi USB was like $90 years ago.

The issue is, how well did you control the comparison? The problem with a lot of people's comparisons is that its not really 1:1. On the PC side there is a ton of things that can change the quality. Some cards you have to have certain settings to get it to do bit-perfect, and you also need to know if your card is resampling (Creative got dinged with that as their Audigy line basically resampled everything even when you told it not to because that's how the processor chip worked).

That's not to say its completely invalid (or that people aren't getting close enough), but I also know a lot of people are not doing anything close to rigorous testing (stuff like matching volume level, which that alone also makes a huge difference on PC, as the volume slider can actually dictate the bitrate of the sound, meaning even though you might have a 24bit capable DAC, if you're sending it 6-8 bit level sound its going to be worse, and you can't change that just by setting it to 24bit), and that's where a lot of the people that say its obvious one is much better (its known that even fairly small differences in volume can make a huge difference to what people perceive. I think there's studies that showed a like 2dB difference made people say the louder one sounded better. (There is of course a threshold as well, and I'm sure there's a point where loud becomes a hindrance, but at those levels 2dB likely can hardly be ascertained by a human ear and both would be too loud to be enjoyable).

Creative's cards also have a ton of processing options (which is why I go into the Windows panel and check the "disable all audio enhancements"). I think on X-Fi cards you also want to be in the Creation panel (they have that weird 3 panel thing Media/Entertainment, Gaming, and then Creation) for bit-perfect playback.

I personally found that I most prefer 24/44.1 output (which is largely on 16/44.1 signals, I think it actually auto switches to 48/96 when given those signals and then switches back when fed 44.1). Some people prefer resampled.

The $300 sound cards are definitely overpriced and feature a lot of options that people don't really use (for the most part, but for the people that specifically want them, like if it includes a separate multichannel analog output daughter card) its about the only option if you want that. But they also often segment them so that to get certain features you need to go with the highest.

Creative for instance has an external DAC/amp (that has a speaker amp). There's one that cost like $100 more, and for that you get both a 0.1ohm output impedance headphone output (I think the standard one is like 2ohm or something?), as well as a stronger speaker amp output (comes with a bigger power supply). And there's a bunch of ones that do similar (I think on the ZxR cards, the most expensive one has a higher quality DAC and ADC for mic input?). You might want just one of those features specifically, but you then are also paying for things you might not want (the breakout box/dongle volume knob thing for instance).

IIRC she works with audio professionally. When I was in radio we used some ridiculously pricey ISA sound cards. This was in 2003.

Yeah she has long history of working with pro audio gear (and generally knows a ton about quite a lot of technical stuff) from singing and producing acts on cruise ships. My posts probably come off as babbling idiocy to her actually haha.

 

[DigDog]

i read these threads and i immediately want to launch in an extended rant about perception bias, sound coloring, and industry standards, then i remember that you can't argue with religious people, gun advocates or hi-end fanatics.

 

[IronWing]

i read these threads and i immediately want to launch in an extended rant about perception bias, sound coloring, and industry standards, then i remember that you can't argue with religious people, gun advocates or hi-end fanatics.

You left out people who eat raw meat.

 

[paperfist]

IIRC she works with audio professionally. When I was in radio we used some ridiculously pricey ISA sound cards. This was in 2003.

Ah that explains it

I was hoping when I Iooked up Apogee Ensembles I was going to find a nice $300 audio card for my PC so I could rip out my X-Fi card, but alas that wasn't the case and it looks like they are Mac only equipment.

 

[renz20003]

i read these threads and i immediately want to launch in an extended rant about perception bias, sound coloring, and industry standards, then i remember that you can't argue with religious people, gun advocates or hi-end fanatics.

I feel like everyone's playing relatively nice.

Hell I might even pick up a sound card and nice headphones now.

 

[Fritzo]

For VR, an upgraded Aureal Vortex sound card would be nice. I remember playing Unreal Tournament with positional audio, it was amazing!

Ha! I had an Aureal card...the drivers in that thing stunk! Would only work like 50% of the time.

 

[MrSquished]

Question: The HD 598s can be had for $150 versus $320 for the HD600s and $315 for the HD650s. What is the "sound quality" difference in these earphones assuming they are being run with decent equipment? Would one be better served getting the cheaper 598s and spending $150 on a decent DAC/amp or would you get better sound quality from the 600s and using the amp from a Xonar sound card? I understand that a lot of this is subjective but if you could use something like percentages to quantify, like you did with the price difference, that would be very helpful. Thanks.

I have no experience with the HD598's and was never interested in them to read about them so could give no good advice. The HD600's and 650's are very similar. Some people say there is very little difference, but most agree the HD600's at the least have a little more low end for one thing. If it's anything about the HD600's I eventually grew to not like is not enough bass.

My advice, besides googling, would be to go to the head-fi forums and post there. Those guys know their shit and helped me make a lot of the buying choices I made so far. I've been happy with all.

 

[futurefields]

Ah that explains it

I was hoping when I Iooked up Apogee Ensembles I was going to find a nice $300 audio card for my PC so I could rip out my X-Fi card, but alas that wasn't the case and it looks like they are Mac only equipment.

Check out Audient for PC
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/det...Qls7epnQtK2nrzQb60uc80QnG3sD1T7LlRRoCd6_w_wcB
I use Focusrite currently which I'm fine with but if/when I go to buy another interface it will probably be Audient just because the specs are better

 

[Rubycon]

My posts probably come off as babbling idiocy to her actually haha.

Not at all. You've covered the details without unnecessary bias.

As for the Audient, looks sweet, never used it but judging by the reviews it appears to be a solid box with good value. Nothing wrong with that.

As far as gaming DSPs, it's laughable to assume that a consumer sound card costing a few hundred dollars (at most) is going to have a DSP with processing power that can come close to even the entry level CPU nowadays.

Don't get me started on audiophile stuff. If you want a laugh look up coconut audio.

Does anyone remember the motherboard that actually had a valve (tube) on it?

 

[MrSquished]

i read these threads and i immediately want to launch in an extended rant about perception bias, sound coloring, and industry standards, then i remember that you can't argue with religious people, gun advocates or hi-end fanatics.

Going from an internal X-Fi card to an external DAC made a world of difference in sound quality for me. Just sayin'

 

[Murloc]

it's not worth it to use internal cards when you can just buy an AVR or headphone DAC and go to it with HDMI/USB and not have to worry anymore about what your computer does (once you have set the proper settings of course), total separation.

 

[Darwin333]

The 600s are in a league above the 598s. You should see if Massdrop is going to do another Sennheiser version, they had I believe an HD-650 for like $250 not too long ago (and it seems like those do well enough that they often do more runs, I think AKG has had a version of the K70x line on there several times already).

If you already have the Xonar, then I'd definitely say the 600s or 650s, as ASUS was putting an amplifier (its that T.I. chip, but its pretty decent) on their cards and it seemed to be thought to be a good fit with the 6xx Sennheisers. A $150 DAC/amp is going to be compromised in some manner and won't absolutely trump the Xonar (whilst likely using similar level of chips). There might be other reasons (if you want a volume knob you can physically control for instance), but you'll get a bigger upgrade from the better headphones than from the lower ones and low end DAC/amp.

That's not to say lowend DAC/amps are junk, there's plenty of decent ones. I just don't think you're likely to exceed the Xonar by enough. Maybe, somes of Schitt's stuff (and I think there's some others that could compete) that could be noticeably better and not too expensive. Unfortunately sometimes you can buy new gear and like its not as much. So generally, I say focus on the speakers, see how it sounds, and then (unless it specifically is not going to sound appealing, like if you bought something that has lots of bass but don't like bass, or something) improve from there with equipment that should work well with it (so like an amp that's suited for handling that load).

Oh and if you don't have the Xonar already, I'd still say go for the higher end headphones. And then save up and buy someone's used DAC/amp.

Thanks for the detailed answer, hopefully you will indulge me one more time with a more real world question.

I went from a set of cheap $40-50 "gaming" headphones to my current set of old Audio-Technicia ATH-A700's and it was night and day. I also have a Fiio E07K Andes USB DAC and amp. When I use it as a USB DAC I get outstanding sound but not enough volume, when I just use the line in from the speaker controller I get a hiss and the sound quality isn't as great but I get outstanding volume. I do have an Asus Xonar but the back of my case isn't really easily accessible so plugging/unplugging from the card is a pain in the damn ass. Just some background on my current setup.

Would I see the same night and day difference going from the ATH-A700s to the 650s or would it be a more gradual increase in sound quality?

 

[Imp]

it's not worth it to use internal cards when you can just buy an AVR or headphone DAC and go to it with HDMI/USB and not have to worry anymore about what your computer does (once you have set the proper settings of course), total separation.

That came back to bite me a few months back. I installed Audacity to do sound editing and it crashed my external USB sound card to the point that I had to plug/unplug it. Restarting and even turning off the computer didn't reset it. Ended up plugging it into my monitor's built-in USB hub that turned on/off with the monitor. No lag I can notice, surprisingly.

 

[Rifter]

Onboard still doesnt have the quality im looking for, so ill likely reuse my Asus Xonar STX even with my next build.

 

[MrSquished]

nm

 

[Ns1]

holy fuck how do you guys have the time to write such lengthy replies.

 

[brianmanahan]

IIRC she works with audio professionally. When I was in radio we used some ridiculously pricey ISA sound cards. This was in 2003.

dang, ISA in 2003? i don't think i had a mobo with ISA after 98 or 99.

 

[bigboxes]

dang, ISA in 2003? i don't think i had a mobo with ISA after 98 or 99.

You got to remember that businesses don't replace software/hardware as quickly as enthusiast consumers.

 

[bononos]

Positional audio is baked into game engines and even APIs now, so no real need for a dedicated sound processor for that.
..............
That's actually not a bad thing though. Creative were dicks and made gaming audio worse by dominating it and then litigating a company that actually was innovating out of business and then using patents to keep game companies from doing their own (see the Doom 3 situation where id/Carmack wrote their own positional audio but Creative had patents that basically forced id to license with Creative or delay the game to remove it). Some of the blame might should fall on Microsoft for that situation being like that in the first place, but at least they eventually changed it and effectively smashed Creative's stranglehold (starting with Vista). Funny thing is, Creative actually kinda still has a lot of power as they basically control OpenAL, which I believe is pretty widely used in games (doesn't seem to be that prevalent, its in some big name games, but not that many of the past few years unless they just haven't been updating them; I wonder if Creative making it proprietary had something to do with that...).

Didn't Creative used to have their own graphics processor? This was in like the 90s, back when there was the whole mess of different cards (before Nvidia and AMD basically won out with their 3D GPUs). Maybe they just had versions using other companies's chips, but it was before they made Nvidia cards (which I don't think ever got off the ground, can't recall why, wonder if Nvidia touting using GPUs to do 3D audio processing was part of that), so that was actually like them giving up on their own to hock one of their competitors wares. They were aimed at the pro market (like CAD stuff, but again, I think this was back in the mess of Glide/OpenGL/etc days).
...............

Wasn't there talk about how Win10 changed the driver stack that allowed 3d sound acceleration back into the works? And there are recent things like Trueaudio from AMD. I can't remember any exact gaming moments since its been so long but its been said that 3d audio positioning was better back in the day.

Creative also tried to stop end user tinkering with drivers to fix Creative purposely downgrading or breaking their drivers and utilities under Vista - Daniel K.
Microsoft broke the 'stranglehold' with Vista because Creative crap drivers were causing so many problems. I don't think they cared if Creative charged users for Vista drivers since they allowed openal to go on instead of trying to create a viable alternative api model.

I don't think they had the know how to really grow any new business divisions. I remembered they used to have their own brand of cd rom drivers and graphics cards but they were just very mediocre relabeled products. They couldn't seem to fix common issues with their cards and iirc bought companies for certain technologies which they needed eg. pci or was it pcie.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Audio processing can be done entirely in software now, CPUs are most than fast enough for that since 2000 and a $20 USB DACs have better D/A implementations than onboard by virtue of the circuitry for not being on the mobo.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Funnily enough, I removed my Creative X-Fi the other day. I haven't used it in over a year because I use the HDMI out on my graphics card, which goes to my receiver.

 

[Murloc]

That came back to bite me a few months back. I installed Audacity to do sound editing and it crashed my external USB sound card to the point that I had to plug/unplug it. Restarting and even turning off the computer didn't reset it. Ended up plugging it into my monitor's built-in USB hub that turned on/off with the monitor. No lag I can notice, surprisingly.

mhh I have 5.1 so I have an AV receiver and with hdmi there are no drivers so no possible trouble. You just have to let the signal to pass through the computer untouched and undecoded.