Which sound is better: my sound card or my mobos onboard sound?

[Leros]

I have been using the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1 sound card the past year. I recently just purchased Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 motherboard, which has 8 channel sound. Which one is better? Will I lose any system performance by choosing one over the other?

 

[sniperruff]

plug in a pair of nice headphones and decide for yourself. i'd say usually sound cards beat out most on-board sounds in terms of sound quality.

 

[imported_Kensai]

The Live will of course take the cake.

 

[rise]

on a similar note, don't some people use 2 soundcards? i think i remember reading that somewhere but the reasoning escapes me.

i have a av-710 with a dfi-sli-dr coming which i understand has good onboard audio. why would people want/use 2 sound cards/sources?

 

[SVT Cobra]

because onboard mobo quality can not match with the quaility and sound purity of a sound card...the freq's and channels(whatever theyre calling em these days) are much better.....its like onboard gfx vs a gfx card...of course if you do not have the speakers or headphones it won't really matter to you...

 

[rise]

i undrstand the audio card idea, thanks, but i recall people saying they use 2 cards and i was wondering why.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: rise4310
i undrstand the audio card idea, thanks, but i recall people saying they use 2 cards and i was wondering why.

Some people want different capabilities for different situations. Example: Someone has an Audigy for gaming with its surround processing abilities to take the load of the CPU... and has an M-Audio Revolution to listen to music with its better DACs.

To the OP: if you have a speaker set with digital optical input it could be the case that the onboard optical would give you better sound than the soundblaster. I also hated my soundblaster live. It's a posibility that the onboard sound would sound just as good to you... why not try it and decide for yourself?

 

[rise]

ahhh, thanks yyy