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Digital output: integrated vs separate
- Thread starter Val
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topdragon147
Gawd
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2004
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- 928
Bits are bits. I don't think there is any advantage to having a separate sound card.
I'm inclined to agree.
peacetilence
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2004
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For DVD's no difference
For music perhaps
For games, definitely
For recording/sound editing/mic recording definitely
DVD's pass through 1's and 0's in a raw format (either DD or DTS) for your receiver to decode so there would be no difference between sound cards. I say perhaps for music because some sound cards are better than others when it comes to letting you have bit perfect playback. My chaintek AV-710 can't kernel stream music at all for whatever reason. It's no good for ASIO either. Driver support is rather poor for the card as well because bit-perfect playback is possible with really old drivers.
Cards make a huge difference in games because they can't playback the same number of channels, or use EAX effect and could take up more CPU cycles.. My razer barracuda was noticeably faster than my AV-710 and I could use more audio channels in games. Thing with the barracuda though is the Mic input was useless because the recording levels were incredibly weak, so it would have made talking to people during gaming impossible and made it impossible for me to record my guitar through the line in. My $15 AV-710 is superior to it in that respect.
Bit's aren't bits when it comes to windows because windows resamples the sound before it reaches the receiver. You need to use kernel streaming or ASIO for bit perfect playback in music and like I said, I couldn't get those to work with my card using the latest drivers for the AV-710. Asio and kernel streaming worked fine with the Razer card but that card was ass because it had no vista support and the mic/line in were completely useless.
Depending on how anal retentive/obsessive you are, you can get away with using something like the AV-710 or onboard sound if all you do is watch movies and listen to music. I don't think most people would notice the difference between something passed through the windows mixer and resampled to 48khz or played back bit-perfect. Your onboard solution could very well kernel stream or use ASIO just fine.
The X-meridian's main benefit for digital is that you can upsample the sound to DTS and have 5.1 playback in games over SPDIF. You can't do that with any old card with digital out.
For music perhaps
For games, definitely
For recording/sound editing/mic recording definitely
DVD's pass through 1's and 0's in a raw format (either DD or DTS) for your receiver to decode so there would be no difference between sound cards. I say perhaps for music because some sound cards are better than others when it comes to letting you have bit perfect playback. My chaintek AV-710 can't kernel stream music at all for whatever reason. It's no good for ASIO either. Driver support is rather poor for the card as well because bit-perfect playback is possible with really old drivers.
Cards make a huge difference in games because they can't playback the same number of channels, or use EAX effect and could take up more CPU cycles.. My razer barracuda was noticeably faster than my AV-710 and I could use more audio channels in games. Thing with the barracuda though is the Mic input was useless because the recording levels were incredibly weak, so it would have made talking to people during gaming impossible and made it impossible for me to record my guitar through the line in. My $15 AV-710 is superior to it in that respect.
Bit's aren't bits when it comes to windows because windows resamples the sound before it reaches the receiver. You need to use kernel streaming or ASIO for bit perfect playback in music and like I said, I couldn't get those to work with my card using the latest drivers for the AV-710. Asio and kernel streaming worked fine with the Razer card but that card was ass because it had no vista support and the mic/line in were completely useless.
Depending on how anal retentive/obsessive you are, you can get away with using something like the AV-710 or onboard sound if all you do is watch movies and listen to music. I don't think most people would notice the difference between something passed through the windows mixer and resampled to 48khz or played back bit-perfect. Your onboard solution could very well kernel stream or use ASIO just fine.
The X-meridian's main benefit for digital is that you can upsample the sound to DTS and have 5.1 playback in games over SPDIF. You can't do that with any old card with digital out.
Mmm, very interesting argument...
So probably for music/videos no noticable difference. But for games i didnt quite get the argument. So external reciever cant process digital output from games as well as a much cheaper soundcard due to specific hardware?
So probably for music/videos no noticable difference. But for games i didnt quite get the argument. So external reciever cant process digital output from games as well as a much cheaper soundcard due to specific hardware?
Properly configured, you won't see a difference in music & video; like he said, assuming your drivers are any good (under Windows), you can set up playback so you do bit-perfect output and let the OS do nothing to the audio except send it to the card with no resampling whatsoever. (Under Linux, I can tell you that the AV-710 & nvidia HDA do happy bit-perfect output w/ no resampling at all).
Games are a different story though, and the card will definitely matter; EAX, DSP effects, handling a ton of audio chans, etc, wlll depend on the maker.