Sound Blaster Live VS ALC650

[Com807877]

Hi all,

In a 2-speaker set up, speaking strictly of sound quality, would it be worth it to upgrade from on board ALC650 sound to a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card?

Thanks!

 

[Arcanedeath]

The Live will prob. sound slightly better, but you would have to deal w/ creative's drivers and unless you get the live extremly cheaply it's not really worth the hastle of installing it and using creative's drivers. Just an FYI I've had both in operation w/ the same set of speakers before and could tell a slight differance w/ the live, but I had other issues w/ it so had to pull it and go back to the onboard sound (the Live was left over from an old rig) Although if you intend to play games, I'd prob. go w/ the live as it has better Sound API support and better 3d audio. Just my 2 cents...

 

[Lord Evermore]

A board using an ALC650 is utilizing the AC'97 controller built into the chipset southbridge. Audio quality and performance is commensurate with that. 🙂 Only the nvidia nforce chipsets use a hardware audio processor in the southbridge. If you could use digital output from a board then that bypasses the ALC650 as well.

 

[jaeger66]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
A board using an ALC650 is utilizing the AC'97 controller built into the chipset southbridge. Audio quality and performance is commensurate with that. 🙂 Only the nvidia nforce chipsets use a hardware audio processor in the southbridge. If you could use digital output from a board then that bypasses the ALC650 as well.

Actually the 650 provides, as both DAC and codec, the SPDIF outputs for any soft audio it's paired with. Most if not all nForce2 boards also use the 650 as the codec though, which you could bypass using digital out.

 

[jaeger66]

For the 650 it depends somewhat on which controller it's used with, though the bottom line is it mangles anything it touches. The Live simply sounds like crap. So no, I'd wouldn't "upgrade".

 

[Lord Evermore]

So...the 650 destroys everything, and the Live is crap? 🙂 Picky aren't we?

I didn't know the 650 was providing the SPDIF output, but even so that's still digital, no conversion or processing by the codec.

 

[jaeger66]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
So...the 650 destroys everything, and the Live is crap? 🙂 Picky aren't we?

You don't know the half of it. 🙂

I didn't know the 650 was providing the SPDIF output, but even so that's still digital, no conversion or processing by the codec.

Almost, but the 650 in that case must still upsample to 48kHz and convert the stream to SPDIF. That's a minimal impact though and not likely to be an issue sonically for soft audio.