Who Killed PC Audio, and will Soundcards Ever Be a Thing Again?

BulletDust said:
In the days of PCI/AGP I used to push the bus well out of spec, never had a Creative Soundcard crash on me.
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We all did. Nature of the Hard Beast lol Except we did it knowingly and intentionally, but we also usually had purchased a more quality built motherboard that likely had the components to reliably run them out of spec. I think it's in the instances where the motherboard maker made it run at those speeds by default, and then used sub-par parts like capacitors, which as a result caused voltage and/or signal ripple. That's where problems arise... I dunno though, it really may not be a valid point that he had, but I was only bringing it to light for the sake of accuracy to what was said is all. :)

cageymaru said:
I made those notes at 3 in the morning. Quite sure that you're right. :)
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Ah, I wasn't aware it was that late for you! :p It's only 8:30pm here.
I just realized after the fact that the video may not have gone live tonight, so you may have meant last night.... :X3:
 
Formula.350 said:
We all did. Nature of the Hard Beast lol Except we did it knowingly and intentionally, but we also usually had purchased a more quality built motherboard that likely had the components to reliably run them out of spec. I think it's in the instances where the motherboard maker made it run at those speeds by default, and then used sub-par parts like capacitors, which as a result caused voltage and/or signal ripple. That's where problems arise... I dunno though, it really may not be a valid point that he had, but I was only bringing it to light for the sake of accuracy to what was said is all. :)
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I loved my i815 based Gigabyte GA60XET. I sent an email to Gigabyte complaining of a lack of PCI/AGP dividers and ended up with Gigabyte sending me a custom bios with not only the usual PCI/AGP dividers but also 1/5th and 1/6th PCI/AGP dividers! I could run my Tualatin Pentium 3 at 166mhz FSB with everything perfectly in spec!
 
I remember when people used to blast me saying USB is the way PC audio is going because of how noisy it is in a PC. Now almost every quality audiophile DAC is now USB.
 
Wierdo said:
Nothing about Creative destroying Aureal through lawsuits, losing their case against them but still driving their competition out through legal costs?

Aureal's surround sound was miles ahead at the time, after they died the market for sound cards languished under the litigation obsessed Creative's semi-monopoly.

The market was not healthy to begin with, was just proprietary technology and a company protecting its turf with litigation.

Glad MS stuck it to them personally, the company was quite anti-consumer - for example obsoleting products through driver updates and threatening customers who fix that problem themselves - and anti-free market. Just wish an open standard came along to fill the space in surround audio.

And I don't miss the bloated 500mb driver suites either.
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Sounds like they took a page out of Monsters play book.
 
polonyc2 said:
Home Theater audio was rejuvenated with the introduction of Dolby Atmos (and DTS:X)...hopefully the same can happen to computer audio/sound cards
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You think so? I think Atmos is a completely unnecessary marketing ploy for "we've run out of ideas and need to make money to stay in business so lets add more outputs and call it better" No one wants to have to deploy that many speakers in a living room. And not everyone has the ability to take over an entire room of their house for this stuff. And this is coming from someone who has the luxury of a wife who let me take over the living room with shit tons of audio gear.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That is why those who are serious about audio use external DAC's these days. I - for one - am VERY happy with my Schiit Modi Multibit DAC hooked up to my old X-Fi Titanium HD using toslink optical, and playing through my Schiit Jotunheim headphone amp on my Sennheiser HD650's
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I just run optical from my PC motherboard, straight into my HTPC receiver. I don't need some expensive placebo audio device in between.

I was happy when sound cards died. They are never coming back except for fringe use cases.

I have fantastic clean audio and it probably cost less than $5 to add it to my motherboard.

From my perspective, computer sound has never been better.
 
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I find this video and the entire argument petty and just unnecessary.

Like others have said, things have never been as good as they are now.

Speakers, headphones, DACs and in-game audio are amazing these days.
 
Snowdog said:
I just run optical from my PC motherboard, straight into my HTPC receiver. I don't need some expensive placebo audio device in between.

I was happy when sound cards died. They are never coming back except for fringe use cases.

I have fantastic clean audio and it probably cost less than $5 to add it to my motherboard.

From my perspective, computer sound has never been better.
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Well, yeah, if you are using the optical connection, you are bypassing the DAC on your motherboard. Your receiver is now your soundcard, and it is essentially an external dac, albeingt a very large one with many channels and built in amps.

Ever since the death of DSP chips and 3d positioning sound effects with the introduction of Vista, sound cards have been little more than dacs. The ones on the motherboard are pretty bad noise wise. If you are not bothered by hearing your water pump, hard drives and mouse movements through your speakers/headphones then they are fine. Not amazing, but fine.

In your case you aren't even using your on board sound. You are just using the optical interface to move the digital signal to your DAC in your receiver. Same if you use the HDMI for sound. The DAC still resides in the reciever or TV or whatever you use, so that is now your soundcard.

As far as devices go that are expensive, and whose sole benefit are placebo, there are definitely plenty of those, but not everything you don't like or understand is placebo :p
 
It is odd that someone at Creative does this. Is he reminding us that we need to buy their hardware?
I see no compelling reason to ever buy Creative products.
I can see no benefit from buying Creative sound cards either.

You stop being relevant if you don't make products people need or have a good use for beside listing frequency range.

And yes Aureal 3D was one of the best features I heard back then (were talking way back).
 
STrAYeR said:
If Asus and Creative would follow in the footsteps of how often Realtek releases drivers. Creative has shafted customers for years with lack of caring and support. So screw them. Asus also has very bad driver support.
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hehehehe. Well, if Realtek drivers didn't have so many issues, they wouldn't need to release as many drivers.

That being said, Creative has ironed out their drivers pretty well at this point.

There is absolutely no reason to release new drivers unless there are reproducible bugs that need to be fixed.

The really funny thing is that the SB-128 kept coming up.

Way back in the day, I had a SB-64. Come to find out that the only difference between it and the 128 was an ID chip on the 128 that allowed the drivers to enable 128 voices.

Once I found that out, I made a mixed driver package to enable 128 voices on the SB-64. After posting that driver pack, a couple months later, Creative released a "new" driver pack that turned the SB-64 into a SB-128.
 
cyclone3d said:
hehehehe. Well, if Realtek drivers didn't have so many issues, they wouldn't need to release as many drivers.

That being said, Creative has ironed out their drivers pretty well at this point.

There is absolutely no reason to release new drivers unless there are reproducible bugs that need to be fixed.

The really funny thing is that the SB-128 kept coming up.

Way back in the day, I had a SB-64. Come to find out that the only difference between it and the 128 was an ID chip on the 128 that allowed the drivers to enable 128 voices.

Once I found that out, I made a mixed driver package to enable 128 voices on the SB-64. After posting that driver pack, a couple months later, Creative released a "new" driver pack that turned the SB-64 into a SB-128.
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I hate locked features. If they are the same thing, and they cost the same to make, then just sell the fully featured model for whatever price makes it work.
 
Cheveyboy said:
You think so? I think Atmos is a completely unnecessary marketing ploy for "we've run out of ideas and need to make money to stay in business so lets add more outputs and call it better" No one wants to have to deploy that many speakers in a living room. And not everyone has the ability to take over an entire room of their house for this stuff. And this is coming from someone who has the luxury of a wife who let me take over the living room with shit tons of audio gear.
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Have you heard an Atmos setup? You may not want to do the setup, but I am running a 7.1.4 setup in a small room in a basement and the difference from 5.1 is incredible. There is a demo of Star Wars battlefront in Atmos and it is remarkeable. It's one thing if you can't or don't want to set it up, but Atmos /dtsx is a revolutionary change if you want the best surround sound you can get.
 
As was said in the video, most people either don't know any better (they've not experienced a good in-game audio experience) or they don't care; it's difficult to advertise audio products to people because it's basically impossible to advertise an audio experience where as it's super easy for a GPU maker to show comparison images.

I'm big on having a proper audio setup for gaming, I live in my own house (with a tolerant wife) so I have a proper 7.1 speaker setup, I would have probably bought a modern Creative Labs sound card, but they decided that 7.1 was too niche or an extra 3.5 mm output was too expensive so their post-X-Fi cards are only 5.1; they've basically weened me off of their cards because I'm now primarily using the HDMI output on my GPU and I couldn't be happier. Letting Audyssey setup my speaker volumes and distances provides a better experience and, since games now days only use software-based APIs like FMOD or Wwise, I don't need to worry about missing out on any proprietary audio features.

If your primary device is headphones, you need to be concerned about positional audio technologies since you're likely depending on software to mix an environment into something convincing for your brain, if you use surround speakers, your concern should be that they're placed correctly in the room, volumes are set properly, and games correctly position sounds according to speaker placement standards.
 
ecmaster76 said:
MS removed audio from the kernel space in Vista because Creative and other audio vendors were responsible for a significant amount of blue screens.

5.1 is doable without Dolby - HDMI supports PCM. And if you have a dolby encoded source you can bitstream it over HDMI to a receiver or other licensed decoders. Considering you can get a pretty decent receiver for under $200 its hard to justify a sound card
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At first I thought you might know what your talking about til you made this statement "Considering you can get a pretty decent receiver for under $200 its hard to justify a sound card" You sound like my nephew who when he saw me put an album on my turntable, told me he had never seen a cd that big before.
 
No doubt that there is plenty of opportunity for better audio, but Creative is not the solution and no one who has any familiarity with their history should support them. They are a textbook example of how to not only become a monopoly, but to essentially fail at it at the same time. I think the best thing that could happen to push the audio industry forward would be for Creative to go out of business and have multiple separate entities purchase up the individual patents and pool them into to some type of collective, royalty free structure so that actual innovation can take place again.

As for the lame excuse about PCI running out of spec, it was interesting at the time that only Creative had trouble getting their cards to run stably and reliably. Video cards at the time, putting far more demand on the system, never had the same type of issues.

It was also interesting that Creative dropped support for existing hardware immediately when a new OS launched, without fail. They would literally release the exact same hardware every OS generation and slap a new sticker on it if you wanted any "new" software features.

I think a far more interesting and enlightening article would be a look back at the shady dealings of this company, how much it hurt the industry overall, and why we should be dubious about any claims they make about the future.
 
Since I realized that HDMI audio out of any Nvidia or AMD video card was so hassle free for 5.1 and 7.1 I have not looked back. I have a killer sounding Harmon Kardon receiver that I have used since the DTS-HD standard came around and it has eliminated the need for any internal sound card as long as you don't want to record and that means an interface anyway to do it right.

Everything just works. Games are in 5.1 or 7.1 if they support it (and almost everything does) without any tweaking. You are sending raw digital that has not been encoded meaning no CPU work. The receiver becomes the sound card you could say. You want more treble ? Turn it up in the receiver.

You can also get the receiver to switch modes depending on the bitrate of the music you are listening to. Using Foobar as my audio player and WASAPI as my driver allows Foobar to send the right bitrate to the receiver so 24 bit 96k audio doesn't get downsampled by windows default mixer as it is bypassed. Windows defaults to 16bit-44khz. I would suggest everyone run 24bit 48khz since most things are recorded in that format anyway.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, yeah, if you are using the optical connection, you are bypassing the DAC on your motherboard. Your receiver is now your soundcard, and it is essentially an external dac, albeingt a very large one with many channels and built in amps.

Ever since the death of DSP chips and 3d positioning sound effects with the introduction of Vista, sound cards have been little more than dacs. The ones on the motherboard are pretty bad noise wise. If you are not bothered by hearing your water pump, hard drives and mouse movements through your speakers/headphones then they are fine. Not amazing, but fine.

In your case you aren't even using your on board sound. You are just using the optical interface to move the digital signal to your DAC in your receiver. Same if you use the HDMI for sound. The DAC still resides in the reciever or TV or whatever you use, so that is now your soundcard.

As far as devices go that are expensive, and whose sole benefit are placebo, there are definitely plenty of those, but not everything you don't like or understand is placebo :p
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It would be interesting to test the results of bitstream vs multichannel PCM. I've never been able to bitstream multichannel audio codecs over HDMI running Linux, I've only ever been able to do that using Windows, I presume due to PAP (Protected Audio Path) that was introduced with Vista. However, I've run the exact same HTPC to a Pioneer Elite receiver (VSX-LX60) using Windows via bitstream and Linux via Multichannel PCM and I swear the Linux configuration sounds better.

Could be just my personal preference in audio, who knows - But there's definitely a difference.
 
BulletDust said:
It would be interesting to test the results of bitstream vs multichannel PCM. I've never been able to bitstream multichannel audio codecs over HDMI running Linux, I've only ever been able to do that using Windows, I presume due to PAP (Protected Audio Path) that was introduced with Vista. However, I've run the exact same HTPC to a Pioneer Elite receiver (VSX-LX60) using Windows via bitstream and Linux via Multichannel PCM and I swear the Linux configuration sounds better.

Could be just my personal preference in audio, who knows - But there's definitely a difference.
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I bitstream all my audio output from Kodi running without a desktop on a custom Ubuntu 16.04 server install.

It goes straight to my Denon AVR-x1300w which autodetects the appropriate Dolby or DTS streams quite well.

I remember having issues when I first tried as well, but some googling and tinkering fixed it. Can't remember exactly what. Only remember I removed something and then it worked. Maybe I removed pulseaudio?
 
Cheveyboy said:
You think so? I think Atmos is a completely unnecessary marketing ploy for "we've run out of ideas and need to make money to stay in business so lets add more outputs and call it better" No one wants to have to deploy that many speakers in a living room. And not everyone has the ability to take over an entire room of their house for this stuff. And this is coming from someone who has the luxury of a wife who let me take over the living room with shit tons of audio gear.
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I guess but your argument is the same as saying 7.1 or 9.1 is unnecessary, I personally run a 7.1 with speakers on top of my bookshelves as presence speakers. Atmos would make those locations more useful to me and others who have those locations available for speakers.
 
magoo said:
I do have an old auzen tech X-Fi Forte that still rocks the sound if I can match it to the proper game.......that was a righteous sound card.
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I'm surprised it still works. Those things had a crazy high failure rate.
 
Uncle said:
At first I thought you might know what your talking about til you made this statement "Considering you can get a pretty decent receiver for under $200 its hard to justify a sound card" You sound like my nephew who when he saw me put an album on my turntable, told me he had never seen a cd that big before.
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Yeah you can get a decent receiver for that price, is it going to have zero frills? Yeah. Is it going to beat out nearly any sound card solution in that price range? Absolutely. Especially when you factor in you either need to buy an amp or actively powered speakers to drive them with a sound card.

Look I know that there is a huge difference between a $200 receiver and a $2000 one, but come on this isn't really an audiophile situation here. We are talking about stuff better than sound cards, the bar is pretty low.
 
My take as someone who went through all that.

Drivers, they weren't very good but TBH they were better than A3D which was a crashing mess that people only put up with because it was so deadly in FPS games. A3D was just like having wall hacks.

Onboard audio, this stuff was good NVidia sound storm was just really good, people accused me of wall hacks and A3D with that all the time. I cant say that a lot of modern onboard sound are amazing but it just proved that onboard sound could be done very well. And if your mobo has it why spend extra? I tell people now days to try onboard sound and only get a card if you have some interference or noise from the onboard sound. Then you can buy time to do research on external dacs and so on if you want to step up.

HDMI Audio, not a lot of people mention this but its just one whole extra bunch of sound cards that don't need to be sold. People running audio to monitors, TVs, recievers etc..... The graphics makers did as much to kill sound card makers as anyone.

And all of this is compounded by the massive move by the average consumer to laptops and ultrabooks which have no space or configurability for discreet sound.
 
Formula.350 said:
We all did. Nature of the Hard Beast lol Except we did it knowingly and intentionally, but we also usually had purchased a more quality built motherboard that likely had the components to reliably run them out of spec. I think it's in the instances where the motherboard maker made it run at those speeds by default, and then used sub-par parts like capacitors, which as a result caused voltage and/or signal ripple. That's where problems arise... I dunno though, it really may not be a valid point that he had, but I was only bringing it to light for the sake of accuracy to what was said is all. :)


Ah, I wasn't aware it was that late for you! :p It's only 8:30pm here.
I just realized after the fact that the video may not have gone live tonight, so you may have meant last night.... :X3:
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I saw it on 2/7/2017 right after the livestream. They have a pretty good show and I like to watch it from time to time.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I bitstream all my audio output from Kodi running without a desktop on a custom Ubuntu 16.04 server install.

It goes straight to my Denon AVR-x1300w which autodetects the appropriate Dolby or DTS streams quite well.

I remember having issues when I first tried as well, but some googling and tinkering fixed it. Can't remember exactly what. Only remember I removed something and then it worked. Maybe I removed pulseaudio?
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Gawd, I'd love to know how you did it. My HTPC's running Kodi via HDMI to the receiver and I can't get bitstream. Technically speaking, at the end of the day there shouldn't really be much difference between bitstream and Multichannel PCM, but I like seeing DTS-HD on my receiver!
 
BulletDust said:
Gawd, I'd love to know how you did it. My HTPC's running Kodi via HDMI to the receiver and I can't get bitstream. Technically speaking, at the end of the day there shouldn't really be much difference between bitstream and Multichannel PCM, but I like seeing DTS-HD on my receiver!
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How is your Kodi set up? Do you run it over a desktop, or straight on top of a window manager like Openbox?

In other word, does it need to share the audio device with other software, or can it take sole ownership of it?

For me there were two issues.

First time I set it up in Jarvis (16) it just wouldn't work, even after enabling the passthrough options in System->Audio. I remember removing a package, and then it just worked. I THINK that package was pulseaudio. I just ssh:ed in to my HTPC box, and I have confirmed pulseaudio is not installed, so I'm thinking that is probably it.

Then, once I upgraded to Krypton (17) bitstreaming broke again. Turns out in Krypton you have to disable the "Sync Playback to Display" setting in the new "player" menu in settings. With it enabled Kodi will refuse to bitstream, as syncing to playback may require resampling.

Hopefully this helps
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
How is your Kodi set up? Do you run it over a desktop, or straight on top of a window manager like Openbox?

In other word, does it need to share the audio device with other software, or can it take sole ownership of it?

For me there were two issues.

First time I set it up in Jarvis (16) it just wouldn't work, even after enabling the passthrough options in System->Audio. I remember removing a package, and then it just worked. I THINK that package was pulseaudio. I just ssh:ed in to my HTPC box, and I have confirmed pulseaudio is not installed, so I'm thinking that is probably it.

Then, once I upgraded to Krypton (17) bitstreaming broke again. Turns out in Krypton you have to disable the "Sync Playback to Display" setting in the new "player" menu in settings. With it enabled Kodi will refuse to bitstream, as syncing to playback may require resampling.

Hopefully this helps
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My Kodi setup actually runs as a software application on an Ubuntu MATE install. Intel HDMI audio has all the necessary permissions to take ownership to the point of running as administrator - Setting audio up to run as administrator was the only way I could get anything out of Intel HDMI at all.

What graphics card are you running in your HTPC?
 
BulletDust said:
My Kodi setup actually runs as a software application on an Ubuntu MATE install. Intel HDMI audio has all the necessary permissions to take ownership to the point of running as administrator - Setting audio up to run as administrator was the only way I could get anything out of Intel HDMI at all.

What graphics card are you running in your HTPC?
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Mine is a GeForce GT630 (GK208 version, so pretty much the same as a more powerful x16 version of the GT 720).

I used to run with Intel graphics, but for some weird reason, I would have frequent crashes with the MythTV plugin using Intel graphics on the Brazilian channel (Globo). (Brazilian Fiance)

All other MythTV channels would work flawlessly, as would all local content, but that one channel kept crashing the system, but was perfectly stable on Nvidia using VDPAU.

The stream quality - despite being from FiOS - is always pretty poor on Globo, and I'm guessing VDPAU on an Nvidia GPU was more tolerant of poor quality source streams than VAAPI on Intel GPU's.

What are you going to do? My better half needs her one channel in Portuguese, even though it's a bloody ripoff at $20 a month for a single SD channel which is free OTA in Brazil...

Edit:

And if you ever want to try out the "direct to kodi" approach without a linux desktop, this guide is very useful.

I modified it to run on Nvidia hardware, and stable builds instead of experimental ones, but the guide is very good base to work off of.
 
DukenukemX said:
Microsoft killed PC audio when Vista was released. Before Vista, sound cards could use their ability to accelerate audio to relieve the CPU. After that, pretty much those sound cards in Vista and beyond were just DAC's. The other problem with PC audio is licensing issues. Dolby Digital Live or DTS is a feature that's mostly disabled in drivers nowadays. Like a lot of Realtek chips can do DDL and DTS, but isn't enabled. There are hacks to enable this. So because of this, 5.1 digital sound is kinda a licensing issue that nobody wants to pay for. Even if you did get it working, it's mostly done on the CPU. I think even Creative does this now with their sound cards, which they are known for their hardware acceleration.
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Wait, wut??? I've been using dedicated sound cards for years, even before Creative Labs was a thing. I currently have a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCIe in my system. I am planning to build a new system soon and was going to drop the sound card and just use on-board audio for a change, I do often watch DVD/Blu-ray movies on my computer. Does using the on-board audio mean I loose DD and DTS? That would suck! I thought the licensing for decoding DD/DTS was essentially free but the encoding involved additional licensing.
 
Back in the day, Creative was a necessary evil. Now they're unnecessary, so how evil they are isn't relevant.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Microsoft "killed" PC Gaming audio when they got rid of the audio HAL and DSP effects with Vista when they got rid of DirectAudio. Suddenly games had to use their own software audio solution, and hardware "gaming" sound made less sense. (yes, there are workarounds like OpenAL for older soundcards, but...)
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Not true. Vista removed the ability for Directsound to interact with audio drivers [Directsound became the simple way to send unmixed audio directly to the Hardware]. The same effects could still be performed via all other audio APIs [ASIO, OpenAL, or XAudio]. Nothing was "lost"; nothing was stopping Creative from making a new driver stack in XAudio to restore the same exact feature set. They just didn't. [They DID use an OpenAL wrapper to much the same effect, but re-writing the driver would have been the correct and less kludgey solution].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista#Audio_stack_architecture

Likewise, surround sound is a function of the audio content in question; 7.1 still works fine via Directsound for example.

The real reason PC audio has fallen off is twofold:

1: Heavily compressed audio kills the need for high end DACs. At the end of the day, if your audio is compressed to holy hell, you aren't going to see any advantage with a high end audio setup. And speaking as someone who uses said high end DACs, yes, you can tell how heavily compressed most audio samples are.

2: Digital transfer methods, especially HDMI push processing to external devices, removing the need for a high end dedicated DAC within the PC to handle the same function. Basically, everyone who wants high end audio is pushing to a dedicated external DAC, so all you need is a cheapo DAC [generally an AC97 based solution these days] for everyone else.
 
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RedWagnum said:
Wait, wut??? I've been using dedicated sound cards for years, even before Creative Labs was a thing. I currently have a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCIe in my system. I am planning to build a new system soon and was going to drop the sound card and just use on-board audio for a change, I do often watch DVD/Blu-ray movies on my computer. Does using the on-board audio mean I loose DD and DTS? That would suck! I thought the licensing for decoding DD/DTS was essentially free but the encoding involved additional licensing.
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*Most* motherboards have built in Dolby/DTS Decoding, but not Encoding [a handful do]. In any case, most Media apps [WMP] have Decoders built in, albiet in software.

This putting aside Dolby/DTS are compressed to holy hell and should die in a fire. They were necessary when you had to stuff a 5.1 track on a CD/DVD [space constraints], but haven't been necessary for multichannel since Blu-Ray became a thing. At least TrueHD/Master Theater are lossless formats...
 
gamerk2 said:
*Most* motherboards have built in Dolby/DTS Decoding, but not Encoding [a handful do]. In any case, most Media apps [WMP] have Decoders built in, albiet in software.

This putting aside Dolby/DTS are compressed to holy hell and should die in a fire. They were necessary when you had to stuff a 5.1 track on a CD/DVD [space constraints], but haven't been necessary for multichannel since Blu-Ray became a thing. At least TrueHD/Master Theater are lossless formats...
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They aren't usually decoded unless you're running multichannel analogue outputs, which literally no one does. Both DD/DTS are fully capable of being bitstreamed via coax or optical/HDMI digital outputs to a receiver where they are decoded. The exception to the rule is multichannel PCM where the PC does the decoding and passes the signal digitally via HDMI or optical/coax digital output to be played back on a receiver. Considering bitstream and Multichannel PCM, bitstream is by far the most common. I have never seen licencing issues regarding Multichannel PCM.
 
I have a Schiit Modi 2 DAC with a Schiit Valhalla 2 headphone amp. I can hear PC noise through the Valhalla 2 if I use the Modi's USB input, so I ended up using TOSLink to connect the Modi to a Creative Soundblaster Z. Works great.

I also have an older Yamaha receiver without HDMI, I use the Soundblaster's DD encoding to get my 5.1 game audio to my home theater. Not a perfect solution but much cheaper than replacing the perfectly good Yamaha amp.
 
Crappy USB headsets integrating the sound card into the headset killed it IMO. I stopped using add in cards in the early 00's. Loved my Soundblaster with gold plating and all that jazz and it was amazing when I bought it but when the on-board was nearly the same quality for nice gaming headsets and SPDIF could send digital out to my receiver I moved on.

Hoping my current headset lasts a good while more as there is a small selection of analogue surround headsets. The digital ones of reasonable cost have poor quality reviews :(
 
Ripskin said:
Crappy USB headsets integrating the sound card into the headset killed it IMO. I stopped using add in cards in the early 00's. Loved my Soundblaster with gold plating and all that jazz and it was amazing when I bought it but when the on-board was nearly the same quality for nice gaming headsets and SPDIF could send digital out to my receiver I moved on.

Hoping my current headset lasts a good while more as there is a small selection of analogue surround headsets. The digital ones of reasonable cost have poor quality reviews :(
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I'm not too sure where people get the 'onboard sound became the same quality' analogy from?

Onboard sound is literally DAC's decoding work done by the processor, usually fairly cheap DAC's at best. Whereas dedicated sound cards were all about custom chips performing the sound decoding with better quality DAC's and in many cases their own onboard ram.

It wasn't a case of onboard sound getting better, it was a case of processors getting faster. I don't think many here really realise just how hard computing devices worked in the day decoding a simple MP3.
 
Had adlib all way to sound blaster zxr with custom op amps. Wondering where 7.1 go. I have s750 speakers felt abandoned by creative and only card with 7.1 current is asus. So why didnt zxr have 7.1? Had to downgrade to z5500 speakers. Anyways do hope micoblows adds wrappers back but who knows. I do agree with VR being better with better audio which must standardize and give true audio positioning and 24bit or better yet 32 bit. Will see its in Microblows hands. Still not buying in VR game yet but think VIVE is best out now but cost needs to come down.
 
gamerk2 said:
*Most* motherboards have built in Dolby/DTS Decoding, but not Encoding [a handful do]. In any case, most Media apps [WMP] have Decoders built in, albiet in software.

This putting aside Dolby/DTS are compressed to holy hell and should die in a fire. They were necessary when you had to stuff a 5.1 track on a CD/DVD [space constraints], but haven't been necessary for multichannel since Blu-Ray became a thing. At least TrueHD/Master Theater are lossless formats...
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Thanks! That makes me feel better about using the on-board audio. I use PowerDVD for my movie watching and that has decoding for nearly all major formats. So I guess I'll be okay with using on-board audio. Haven't decided on a board yet but it will probably have the ALC1220. That seems to be the trend on the mid to upper end motherboards in the $150 to $225 price range.

While I agree with your comments about DD/DTS, I'm not a youngster any more and my hearing is not what it used to be. If I were to do a blind test between DD 5.1 and DD TrueHD 5.1 I would never be able to tell the difference so the compression factor is a non-issue for me. I just don't want to lose the surround audio in movies or the positional audio in games.
 
Makes no difference to me if sound cards stay gone. Way back when, i had a Hercules Game Theater setup. I loved it. Then Creative went thermonuclear with lawsuits and killed everything. Fuck Creative. Once i could no longer use the Game Theater, i just went to on board audio and have never looked back. Most of my PC gaming is done with headphones and my current rig works great. No background noise, good sound.
 
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