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Sound card vs onboard sound

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Well, laptops are terrible, the end. Sound, screen, keyboard, overclocking, graphics, it's always going to suck.

We're talking about desktop, proper PCs here.
 
postmortemIA said:
For some reason, i could never replicate sound quality of my X-Fi with onboard audio. It always sounded dull. I have decent speakers (Logitech Z-5500). It is even worse on my laptop, that has onboard only. There is constant high pitch noise whenever laptop is plugged in.

Not sure if Relatek and rest have introduced similar feature by now, when I tried it was not there; I always like Creative Lab's CMSS 3D that expands stereo sound to surround.
Click to expand...

Creative cards have a default equalizer setting that punches up the highs and lows quite a bit. That's something that people can certainly perceive as "better" but isn't necessarily faithful to the recording.

Once you get used to that setup, everything else will seem "dull", even if it is more accurate than what the Creative card was putting out. Luckily, even onboard sound cards come with equalizers where you can replicate the Creative sound if you so desire.
 
mfenn said:
Creative cards have a default equalizer setting that punches up the highs and lows quite a bit. That's something that people can certainly perceive as "better" but isn't necessarily faithful to the recording.

Once you get used to that setup, everything else will seem "dull", even if it is more accurate than what the Creative card was putting out. Luckily, even onboard sound cards come with equalizers where you can replicate the Creative sound if you so desire.
Click to expand...
my software equalizer is off ... are you talking about some DSP effect on the hardware level or one accessed via their software?

Beside, creative sound card does sound better than onboard if you use built-in DAC of both (meaning not optical out). Simply because Creative's solution uses 3rd party DAC that is not dirt cheap as onboard.
 
I just did some testing at home. I do some audio engineering, and have produced 3 albums over the years. I am still an amateur, but I am used to listening to music critically.

Setup is a decent Dantax amp, a home made 15" passive sub, and two homemade speakers with 6" speakers. The speakers are defintely in the nice end of the spectrum.

Worst sound quality:
Macbook Pro onboard. Slightly more noise than the rest.

Medium:
Asus G53 onboard
Behringer USB sound card analog
Desktop with M-Audio Delta 44

Best:
Behringer sound card digital out. No audible noise, even at very high volume.

My conclusion: The quality of the DAC or the chips of the sound card matters little (None of the tested items were in the "complete crap" category, though). The noise of the environment is much more important. The smoking gun is the low (relatively speaking, it was a very subtle difference) quality is the Macbook Pro's sound. I know that the onboard sound in that one is as good as the one in the G53, but there is a lot more room in the G53. That makes it possible to place the sound card farther from any noise sources.

Note: I only tested music at mp3 320kbit and 16bit 44khz. No games.
 
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There was a time many years ago when all MB audio was crap but that's changed. This is now one of those subjective questions. As you can see OP you're getting alot of conflicting answers. Really you need to judge for yourself. I was a long time SB user, my last card was an Xfi but dumped it after my last upgrade for MB audio mainly because of crappy driver support on the part of Creative. To my surprise, the quality of the the MB audio was on par with what I was used to without any of the software bloat and proprietary connector nonsense that Creative is known for. There are alternatives to Creative if you do decide to get a dedicated card.

Why not let your own ears tell you? 🙂
 
Using Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 speakers on a X58A-UD5 on-board audio to Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS was a HUGE improvement.
Changing the Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS to Xonar D2X "OMG!" More improvement than mobo to Audigy.
 
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BOTH, Sound Card AND Speaker quality is AS
important for the best sound quality.
The fact is a $20 aftermarket PCI sound card beats the quality of realtek or any modern mobo onboard sound quality.
 
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