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MrWizard6600
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2006
- Messages
- 5,791
(this is for the desktop in sig)
My thinking was, as I'm sure is the case with many [H] members, I dropped $280 on this motherboard, which is absurd, so absurd that it must do whatever it does well. Indeed: 470MHz FSB, dual 16X PCI-E 2.0 lanes, ICH9R, raid 0, 1, and 5, 12-phase CPU power regulation, a fuckin massive Northbridge cooler. What this board does, it does in fact do very well.
And it does sound, so, following that logic...
Well it does not do sound well. In fact it does it very poorly. My thoughts were that, because both the op-amps and the DACs are done entirely in silicon, their performance must be proportional to the growth of the rest of the silicon industry.
I bought an Auzentek Bravura to replace the "Supreme FX II" stock Asus Maximus Forumla audio card whose 3.5mm audio jack was worn through. (I actually RMA'd the card, explaining exactly what happened to the guy on the phone, and, props to Asus, they said they'd replace it for me. Well they didn't replace it, they sent me a whole fucking new board, sans the audio card
) The Supreme FX II has got its own daughter board and comes with a chip that isn't from the Realtek ALC-800 family --its even got its own EMI shield.
As I've mentioned previously on these boards I was in an electrical engineering program, and my thoughts were, while I've never been sure exactly whats going on with depletion layers in the silicon of op-amps, i just figured that with such a huge degree of control over silicon production, modern DAC's and modern amps must be great. I'm fully aware of the difference in "quality" an equalizer can give you; boost everything below 100Hz and everything above 16000Hz and you'll get people swearing its an entirely new system. O always figured anyone talking about how epic vinyl is and how $200 amps are great are the same people saying that their HDTV is better than mine because their HDMI cabling has only the finest gold-plated gas-injected free-range grain-fed copper. I was wrong.
This setup, simply 192 kbit mp3 + Auzentek Bravura + audio Technica ATH-A700... I've got some friends who play guitar, and I've been to my fair share of concerts (granted, I'm a bigger Red Hot Chili's fan than a Hans Zimmer fan), and this is better (from a sound quality perspective at least) than both of those things live. When I can put together the money I might pickup some better more sound-purposed hardware, but I'm gonna have to do some research first.
I'm gonna have to experiment with audio equipment and different encoding methods now: I'm gonna have to investigate different audio encoding/decoding schemes and see if its worth digging out my whole music collection and re-encoding to AAC or even FLAC. I'm gonna have to try and get my hands on some never-encoded-to-CD audio.
if anyone else out there was thinking like I was, pickup a $150 card, try it, and pay the restocking fee and fire me an angry PM if you don't like it; there's no doubt in my mind you wont be paying that restocking fee, you don't need an audiophiles ear's to hear the difference. My video budget: sound budget ratio has just gone from about 10:1 to about 3:2, I'll remember this for any future builds I do for anyone.
My thinking was, as I'm sure is the case with many [H] members, I dropped $280 on this motherboard, which is absurd, so absurd that it must do whatever it does well. Indeed: 470MHz FSB, dual 16X PCI-E 2.0 lanes, ICH9R, raid 0, 1, and 5, 12-phase CPU power regulation, a fuckin massive Northbridge cooler. What this board does, it does in fact do very well.
And it does sound, so, following that logic...
Well it does not do sound well. In fact it does it very poorly. My thoughts were that, because both the op-amps and the DACs are done entirely in silicon, their performance must be proportional to the growth of the rest of the silicon industry.
I bought an Auzentek Bravura to replace the "Supreme FX II" stock Asus Maximus Forumla audio card whose 3.5mm audio jack was worn through. (I actually RMA'd the card, explaining exactly what happened to the guy on the phone, and, props to Asus, they said they'd replace it for me. Well they didn't replace it, they sent me a whole fucking new board, sans the audio card
) The Supreme FX II has got its own daughter board and comes with a chip that isn't from the Realtek ALC-800 family --its even got its own EMI shield. As I've mentioned previously on these boards I was in an electrical engineering program, and my thoughts were, while I've never been sure exactly whats going on with depletion layers in the silicon of op-amps, i just figured that with such a huge degree of control over silicon production, modern DAC's and modern amps must be great. I'm fully aware of the difference in "quality" an equalizer can give you; boost everything below 100Hz and everything above 16000Hz and you'll get people swearing its an entirely new system. O always figured anyone talking about how epic vinyl is and how $200 amps are great are the same people saying that their HDTV is better than mine because their HDMI cabling has only the finest gold-plated gas-injected free-range grain-fed copper. I was wrong.
This setup, simply 192 kbit mp3 + Auzentek Bravura + audio Technica ATH-A700... I've got some friends who play guitar, and I've been to my fair share of concerts (granted, I'm a bigger Red Hot Chili's fan than a Hans Zimmer fan), and this is better (from a sound quality perspective at least) than both of those things live. When I can put together the money I might pickup some better more sound-purposed hardware, but I'm gonna have to do some research first.
I'm gonna have to experiment with audio equipment and different encoding methods now: I'm gonna have to investigate different audio encoding/decoding schemes and see if its worth digging out my whole music collection and re-encoding to AAC or even FLAC. I'm gonna have to try and get my hands on some never-encoded-to-CD audio.
if anyone else out there was thinking like I was, pickup a $150 card, try it, and pay the restocking fee and fire me an angry PM if you don't like it; there's no doubt in my mind you wont be paying that restocking fee, you don't need an audiophiles ear's to hear the difference. My video budget: sound budget ratio has just gone from about 10:1 to about 3:2, I'll remember this for any future builds I do for anyone.
