How good is current on-board audio?

[Jman13]

I've been using an SB Live Value as my sound card for around 5 years now, and it still works fine, but since my new Epox EP-9NDA3+ is on the way, I was wondering if I should just ditch the card and go with the onboard ALC850 audio. Are the newer on-board audio solutions any good? I will eventually pick up an Audigy 2, but for now, I just don't need it. Running with a 4.1 speaker setup. Thanks!

 

[piesang]

Stick with the live. The onboard doesn't sound as good and it uses more CPU cycles.

 

[Zap Brannigan]

There are solutions other than Creative out there.

Look here.

Look here for a less expensive but highly acclaimed offering.

 

[Jman13]

I know there are other solutions, but one of the requirements I have to have is decent MIDI capability (my wife is a professional musician, and I am an amateur who composes from time to time.) While it's not particularly important in the short term (thus the consideration of the onboard audio), but it will be important in the long term. Know of any other manufacturers that produce good gaming cards with good MIDI support? I know all cards can play MIDI, but the sound bank management and sample creation done by Creative is very good for a consumer level card. That Chaintech card does look interesting, though.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Jman13
I know there are other solutions, but one of the requirements I have to have is decent MIDI capability (my wife is a professional musician, and I am an amateur who composes from time to time.) While it's not particularly important in the short term (thus the consideration of the onboard audio), but it will be important in the long term. Know of any other manufacturers that produce good gaming cards with good MIDI support? I know all cards can play MIDI, but the sound bank management and sample creation done by Creative is very good for a consumer level card. That Chaintech card does look interesting, though.

Generally, I thought that people "in the know" who worked with MIDI would either play the notes back using an external synthesizer, or with some kind of softsynth - in which case the MIDI sound bank performance of the sound card means nothing. As a very inexperienced amateur "musician," I can yet say that I have played with this stuff just enough to know that if your keyboard is worth much, it will probably be better than the soundcard's samples, and a piano softsynth will blow almost everything else away in terms of audio quality.

To answer the original question, I used to use my SBLive over the Nvidia Soundstorm, but then I discovered that the Nvidia solution had ASIO drivers which the SBLive lacked, and thus my latency in pro audio programs fell out of the sky. If the onboard sound didn't have anything special, though, I'd still use the SBLive.

 

[Jman13]

I have separate sound banks that you can use with the Creative line of cards. My grand piano sample set alone is nearly 20MB. It is a much nicer sample than the keyboard we own. Neither of us are world class composers or anything, but we like the ability to have very high quality sound samples, and to upgrade them as necessary. If we really wanted to produce with just MIDI, we'd use separate non-computer hardware, Roland sound banks, etc, but it still is important on some level.