Discrete sound cards and onboard sound.

[Kristijonas]

Sorry, I have no headphones, I'm using Edifier R1900Tii (06 ed) 2.0 speakers.

 

[TheInternal]

Wowie. The thread got a bit all over the place, but it had some interesting posts in it relevant to my current situation.
As an owner of Creative Labs sound cards over the years, I've found I have little respect for the company due to their failure to properly support their products in newer OS releases. Anything less than the X-Fi lineup has un-fixable issues if you use 5.1 sound and a microphone in Win7. Windows 7's handling of sound (and Creative's very slow willingness to implement driver support for even partial functionality) often resulted in weirdness and troubleshooting for me when I tried my Audigy 1 and 2 ZS cards.
I can tell a noticable difference in sound quality between a discrete Creative card and integrated audio circa 2008. I'm curious to see how current onboard sound plays. I'm reluctant to ever suggest Creative to anyone after all the driver shennanagins in Windows 7 (in which they wouldn't release drivers to full support the hardware, an end user did, then Creative sued / tossed a cease and desist at the guy).
I'm curious about trying out the one of the cheaper Xonars myself if the onboard sound in a socket z77 mobo is meh.
I do wonder how much of the stuff I am concerned about is just marketing hype / bs (especially in regards to EAX and positional audio in games).
I own some old (but still good sounding) Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 speakers. They've been my speakers for years / still sound good. Based on a few of ya'll trying out the cheapie Xonar and noticing a big difference, I may have to go the same route. looks like it's on sale at newegg for 14 bucks after rebate... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132020

 

[Kristijonas]

TheInternal, if you have a good Creative SC, then perhaps there's no need to update to Xonar? But then, I wouldn't know, because all I've used are 2011/2012 onboard and 2011 ASUS Xonar DG.

 

[Nawlins]

Kristijonas, I'm thinking about getting a sound card for my system and keep waffling between your sound or the Sound Blaster X-fi hd as I'm more into music and movies than gaming on my system. I'm glad to hear that you are pleased with the Xonar so now I'm leaning toward Asus. Do you have Windows 7 64 bit, and if so, is the Xonar driver easy to install? I'm a little iffy with the Sound Blaster because of a lot of complaints that the SB driver is buggy with Windows 7 64 bit.

 

[Kristijonas]

Windows 8 64bit, and drivers for win7 64bit installed flawlessly. However there are unofficial "unified xonar drivers" and they don't work with win8, but this will probably be fixed soon.

My choice for Xonar DG was after I've read many reviews on the internet (more than 10 to be honest). All of the reviews more or less agree about the noticeable difference (both subjective and objective) of good onboard sound vs Xonar DG. There were only 1-3 reviews who said the difference couldn't be felt or was too little to matter. Well, now that I have this card, I disagree with them.

 

[Nawlins]

Thanks for the reply Kristijonas. Off to Newegg I go

 

[Kristijonas]

Let us know how you like it after you try it!

 

[HeXen]

i have a xfi Fatal1ty pcie card in my closet. But my new mobo has supreme fx 3 which has eax 5.0...etc.
sounds the same to me. Onboard definitely has come a long way.

 

[Kristijonas]

Well supreme fx 3 is something exceptional. I'm not surprised there's no difference.

 

[ZeroRift]

Sorry, I have no headphones, I'm using Edifier R1900Tii (06 ed) 2.0 speakers.

I don't know anything about em, but if they sound good to you, great! I'll have to check them out when I'm in the market for speakers.

I was just reiterating that having a solid set of speakers / headphones really amplifies the affect of discrete audio.