So it appears to be on the individual as to if its worth using a sound card or onboard. I will just need to hook up rest of my 7.1 speakers and judge for myself. Thanks everyone for pointing out the pros and cons and areas in which to listen to.
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Is it worth using a sound card in newer builds?
- Thread starter rjolin01
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paul-e-wog
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While standing in line with my 1/2 price sub this past Boxing Day, I had the opportunity to watch a Future Shop associate upsell some poor noob on Monster Cables for his brand new home theatre. I'm talking EVERYTHING, from power cables to coax to stereo to HDMI. Had it not meant abandoning my place in an epic line I'd already spent close to an hour languishing in, I might have been able to help. To this day I feel bad. I should have done more .......
Tee hee! Monster Cables come with a lifetime warranty. It doesn't matter if you can buy 25 excellent cables for the price of a single Monster, because in the event your Monster Cable fails 25 times it will have paid for itself.
But they are pretty!
Realtek took a real beating during the early and middle decade and went back to the drawing board. Now today they are used on almost any motherboard worth its looks.
On top of that the sound situation has totally changed. A great deal more every year are switching to digital... either through Optical or HDMI. In the case like that only the very top notch of sound cards will have any noticeable difference and even then you have to have the very best in equipment to notice.
I bought 50 dollar Turtle Beach card. Its only advantage was Dolby Digital live which was supposed to hardware encode discreet 5.1 audio into a DD stream. It was a nightmare to setup and the quality was actually worse. And I had but one or two games that could take advantage of it in any way. Needless to say its now disabled and just sits in my case to look pretty.... I run my HT system from optical from the 790GX mobo... Many more games use Dolby Pro Logic and the sound quality beats any sound card I have ever used...
On top of that the sound situation has totally changed. A great deal more every year are switching to digital... either through Optical or HDMI. In the case like that only the very top notch of sound cards will have any noticeable difference and even then you have to have the very best in equipment to notice.
I bought 50 dollar Turtle Beach card. Its only advantage was Dolby Digital live which was supposed to hardware encode discreet 5.1 audio into a DD stream. It was a nightmare to setup and the quality was actually worse. And I had but one or two games that could take advantage of it in any way. Needless to say its now disabled and just sits in my case to look pretty.... I run my HT system from optical from the 790GX mobo... Many more games use Dolby Pro Logic and the sound quality beats any sound card I have ever used...
again just because I don't think this received the attention it deserved, this really varies A LOT mother board to mother board. My DFI mother board audio sucks, the asus mother board I used on my moms is pretty damn good. in the end your exactly right in that your going to have to listen to it yourself and decide.
QuothTheRaven
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Unless you're a hardcore audio enthusiast with hundreds of dollars invested in your speakers, the on-board audio on a good motherboard should be fine.
Which is far different from say my pentium 4's mobo which has a realtek from before they took their heads out their butts. Even with cheapo speakers you could hear how crap it was.
Then again I was flipping through the Archives of the tech report and it seems Optical Audio was being used on serious mobos as far back as 2002... Too bad there is no more Nforce 2s of any worth. I would have loved to experience its Dolby Digital Live to compare with today.
Unknown-One
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Speaking in terms of quality alone (extra features such as EAX aside), if you're just going to use the optical output, does your choice of sound card matter a whole lot?
All your sound card has to do at that point is output an unmodified digital stream. Your external equipment handles the rest.
All your sound card has to do at that point is output an unmodified digital stream. Your external equipment handles the rest.
My thoughts
- If you listen to music and use digital connect to external amp, a sound card is meaningless
- If you use analog, then a soundcard might help some. But with the advent of HDMI and if you already have a decent reciever... there is almost no reason to go with analog.
- To me, the whole 320 kbps MP3 or AAC vs. lossless issue is the most stark example I've seen of flawed human perception, thought & and the placebo effect. I used to be a FLAC zealot - my music collection was about 100gb FLAC only... one day I was poking around and starting reading up again on AAC and lossy encoding .I decided to try a few lossy encodes to test (I use AAC @~170kbit NeroAacEnc 1.5.3) and ran my own double blind tests. I was not able to even tell the difference on any of the 10 tracks I selected; this on a decent home sound system. I went ahead and compressed my entire collection to AAC and deleted all my FLAC, and my collection is much more manageable... Now I have realized that 99.9999% of the time anyone who says "they can tell the difference" never follows up with proof. And it's easy to do your own double blind test (ABX test) to do so. I actually did another test for fun... I took one of my FLAC files, and compressed it to AAC over and over and over. I had to compress most songs at least 5 (FIVE) successive times to even hear the difference at ~170kbit/s rate, lol. And even then all I could say was it started to sound "different," not even necessarily "worse." I had to compress it 8-10 times to go that far.
- I'm still trying to understand the benefits of a dedicated sound card for gaming myself these days. There doesnt seem to be much information out there on the topic. What exactly does OpenAL do? Is the same accomplished in software for proper surround sound w/o hardware support? If so, what impact does it have on performance? If not, what exactly is one losing? I think I'm going to have to do my own test when I pick up a ATI 5770 and compare it to my PCI X-Fi Fat1ality Xtreme Whatever Professional card. Can someone reccomend some games to test?
LGabrielPhoto
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Sorry but that alone makes me disregard your "proof" and also makes me wonder how "decent" your gear really is (or room acoustics) when you can even tell the difference doing that.
That latter part is EXACTLY right. There is VERY little you cant find on a mobo including sound chips from the stone age. It happens alot usually on cheapo boards but sometimes oddly enough on expensive mobos as well...
For instance I wont touch a VIA sound card or onboard. No offense to the company and I hope they compete with Atom in the future and they did make kickbutt mobos back in the day. However, Every time I have heard a VIA sound its crap.
Now of course the best way to avoid all the mess is to use digital and crank up the rate. All sound cards suffer from a harsh EM environment that is inside any PC. Digital makes it far easier to avoid that as light is pretty difficult to affect.
For instance I wont touch a VIA sound card or onboard. No offense to the company and I hope they compete with Atom in the future and they did make kickbutt mobos back in the day. However, Every time I have heard a VIA sound its crap.
Now of course the best way to avoid all the mess is to use digital and crank up the rate. All sound cards suffer from a harsh EM environment that is inside any PC. Digital makes it far easier to avoid that as light is pretty difficult to affect.
demografik
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are you talking about via built cards or via in general? i'd like to see what you have that makes a via envy24 based card sound like crap.
VIA cards and onboard sound. Via as a company is quite awesome. I do hope to use their new super small form factor systems in the future. But their sound systems has always been a joke.. Except for that one with the onboard tube. I would have loved to try that but no longer offered sadly.
As for what makes it and just about any other card sound like crap? Digital...
Optical audio out to a Samsung AV-R720 absolutely beautiful sound.... From a realtek..
The turtle beach (When DDL was turned off) put out the same quality optical audio as well as the Audigy card I had in the other computer (Hooked up via Coax but same bits) same audio but damn what a crazy run to get drivers that work..
With the realtek windows autodetects and it just works. Now granted if you dont install proper catalyst drivers the Realtek chips on ATI cards will revert to the standard digital out instead of the HDMI mode 5.1 or 7.1 full seperation audio...
I don't think there really is an answer to all this... The issue is Placebo is a VERY real effect and it works both ways.
I listen to these CDs that use certain types of sound frequencies to help promote "Delta Wave" brain patterns that help you sleep apparently (I think its the same thing with people that sleep next to a fan) Anyway. I have never compressed the audio because I feel that an encoder might mistake those waves as something that can be discarded. Even at extremely high bitrates.
So its a by situation thing...
Now of course MP3 needs to just fall into the realm of MP2 and MP1 as far as encoding sound for everyday use goes. Mpeg 4 audio is FAR more modern and MP3 will far more damage to audio even at high bitrates.
demografik
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do you realize what you just said? your digital out doesn't "come from" the realtek because it's still a digital signal. it hasn't been processed. a sound card is a DAC, a digital to analog converter. you have to have something to convert it to analog to listen to it. in your example, you're using the AV R720 to convert it. obviously, a real receiver worth several hundred dollars is going to give you a better sound than a $50 sound card.
i was hoping we could compare apples to apples.
I said realtek to highlight that it is from the mobo (790GX in case anyone is wondering) Of course I know the difference between analog and digital ive been talking about it throughout this post!
Anyway the point is today you don't spend 8 tons of money to use speakers connected to a mobo (Well unless its an MSI Diva which is a completely different situation) For instance many people still buy those 5.1 speaker sets that connect to the analog out of mobos and cards. Well they automatically suffer the EM issues and on top of those most of the time the speakers themselves come nowhere close to an average Home theater amp. So even if you go ahead and spend a ton of money to get some advanced high end C-Media based card or a high end X-Fi you yet again suffer disadvantage after disavantage. Quickly killing value and making it little better than running from even the analog portion of todays mobos.
Now then again we hit a bunch of differing situations. Some games don't output anything close to decent Dolby Pro Logic and can only use a multi speaker approach for surround gaming. However. I found the hassle far outweighed the benefits... Many games couldnt seem to use a multichannel approach so when I tried the analog route often times I was stuck with 2.1... Even those windows was set to 5.1
It depends:
If you use digital output (SPDIF, TOS) - onboard is probably fine unless you have special needs like DD:Live DTS:Live that it doesn't have
If you use analog output - a good sound card will sound much better.
Whether you notice or need "much better" is up to you, not the forum.
If you use digital output (SPDIF, TOS) - onboard is probably fine unless you have special needs like DD:Live DTS:Live that it doesn't have
If you use analog output - a good sound card will sound much better.
Whether you notice or need "much better" is up to you, not the forum.
demografik
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the whole point is comparing sound cards to other sound cards. if you want to spend hundreds of dollars, buying a sound card is obviously beneath you. you're going to be using digital out to a real receiver or at least a usb DAC.
in the realm of sound cards, the via envy24 is a good chip.
in the realm of sound cards, the via envy24 is a good chip.
Ok then lets restrict it to the realm of 2.1 where there are good 2.1 speakers out there. In a case like that maybe and you say your envy is a good card. Well there are 50 USD X-Fi's and More importantly 50 USD C-Media cards out there. I would SERIOUSLY doubt a VIA sound card can beat those. But do please give me reviews.
BTW dosent almost any Mobo in existance today have atleast a 3 pin SPDIF out? Id grab some electrical tape and make up a quick little thing to convert it into coax that works in most 5.1 receivers these days instead of using those USB dodads.
Your mistake was deleting the flac files. Even if you can't tell the difference, having Flac means you can convert to any format without re-ripping the CDs. If there's some sort of quantum leap in sound or ABC knocks AAC and MP3 off the block as the preferred lossy codec, you run a batch file and you've converted everything while you sleep.
Personally I've got at least 200GB in Flac and if I get around to encoding the CD's I bought over the last 5 years, I'll have another 150gb (give or take). From there, I'll convert to whatever I need. For the time being, I'm sticking with Vorbis, but if I buy a Zune, I'll go to WMA....if I get an iPod, it's AAC. It doesn't matter, because whatever it is, the conversion will happen over night.
GotNoRice
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Digital (Via onboard SPDIF or HDMI or whatever) is not automatically better than Analog. The Digital to Analog conversion still has to take place you've just shifted it farther down the chain. If you are plugging into an expensive HT receiver with a D/A converter better than most soundcards that can be a good thing, but if you are plugging into some cheap logitech speakers or similar, it's probably actually a bad thing. And of course there is still the potential for jitter as well as the actual capabilities of the Digital output, like can it pass 44.1k without automatically re-sampling everything to 48k? Can it do 96k? etc
Computers try to reduce EM but its not a huge priority especially in lower tier mobos. Reducing EM is almost everything for Receiver makers.
I may have missed something but when did logitech go digital? From what I saw their 5.1 speaker series uses analog.
I may have missed something but when did logitech go digital? From what I saw their 5.1 speaker series uses analog.
Was this directed to me?
I didn't say digital was better than analog. The OP's question is about his onboard or add-on sound card, not about his end-to-end audio solution. He didn't state whether he uses digital or analog out.
If he uses digital and he's not shopping for any different components in the rest of his setup it will likely make little difference whether he uses on-board or not. It isn't a matter of digital=better, it's a matter of digital from the PC means that the critical quality decisions aren't at the PC.
I'm still using analog out so I find it makes a huge difference (and on-board analog generally sounds like crap). But I seem to be in a dwindling minority...
Definetly not a mistake. keeping the FLACs while "waiting" for that magical codec would completely defeat the point of deleting them in the first place. I'll be fine with keeping the AAC files, no matter what codec comes out. The improvment can only be incremental. And the Zune supports AAC, as well as any other media player worth anything. Another reason I picked that formet.
Don't expect another codec to come and knock AAC out. We've reached the limits of diminishing returns, and that stared in the early 90's with mp3. Again, keeping the FLAC's and having multiple collections of different lossy files is silly, IMO. AAC will work on anything, computers, consoles, phones, media players.
matrix563
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i'm using the digital coxial out on this mini itx mobo and i am not sure there is a difference compared to my digital out on my audigy 2zs. course both are connected to a 7.1 receiver, so 
maybe its time to sell the audigy's. the other pc's have coxial outs as well as optical.
maybe its time to sell the audigy's
. the other pc's have coxial outs as well as optical.In a world where a 2 Terabytes will soon cost under $100.00, I see no reason not to keep things as flexible as possible. The biggest expense, IMNSHO, is my time spent ripping the CDs in the first place. The cost of a few hundred GB of storage is less than the price of $50.00. As for multiple lossy file types, I have no idea what you're talking about. At most, i'd keep a copy of the whatever format I currently use (in addition to flac) and within a year or so, i wouldn't even do that, since I could fit the entire collection on a Solid State Player (I can already fit it all on an HD based system).
Hornet
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I think this question of whether or not to use soundcard or not is something that many people encounters.
I asked myself the same question too with my new build, almost went for Asus Rampage 2 Extreme because it came with a X-Fi card, in the end, decided against it and now I will go for a Gigabyte board instead, with USB 3 goodies
Hornet
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I think this question of whether or not to use soundcard or not is something that many people encounters.
I asked myself the same question too with my new build, almost went for Asus Rampage 2 Extreme because it came with a X-Fi card, in the end, decided against it and now I will go for a Gigabyte board instead, with the USB 3 goodies
Blazestorm
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I built a newer system with a P55 EVGA board... I tried the onboard sound for about 5 minutes before realizing it was terrible compared to the ASUS Xonar I was about to sell, I stuck that back in there and have been using it since then...
It really depends on your setup and how sensitive you are with music. If you're someone who's content with the stock iPod headphones / cheap stuff... then you'll probably be content with the onboard sound.
It really depends on your setup and how sensitive you are with music. If you're someone who's content with the stock iPod headphones / cheap stuff... then you'll probably be content with the onboard sound.
CrazyCuz2k
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I don't think I've ever taken out any of the earbuds from the 4 ipods I've ever bought. First I bought the etyomotic 6i's, then sennheiser 595's after they broke, then shure se310's when I wanted to go back to IEM, and now shure se110's since I lost the 310's and can't fork over the extra money for the se310's. But yes... to each their own.
Not any more.
years in fact. that went out around the same time as software rendering as I recall. (more or less, I don't think it happened overnight)
i still dont understand why microsoft removed directsound from its newer op systems. what a stupid move.
there is NO onboard sound card that can compete with a half decent hardware accelerated add-in card. even when you buy the high-end asus formula board all you get is a shitty softwarebased card....which is a joke. i love windows 7 but id love to jam my old cds up the moron's arse who made the decision to rip direct sound out of windows 7. its the equivalent to any game made now that doesnt support widescreen....makes no sense.
there is NO onboard sound card that can compete with a half decent hardware accelerated add-in card. even when you buy the high-end asus formula board all you get is a shitty softwarebased card....which is a joke. i love windows 7 but id love to jam my old cds up the moron's arse who made the decision to rip direct sound out of windows 7. its the equivalent to any game made now that doesnt support widescreen....makes no sense.
I think this question of whether or not to use soundcard or not is something that many people encounters.
I asked myself the same question too with my new build, almost went for Asus Rampage 2 Extreme because it came with a X-Fi card, in the end, decided against it and now I will go for a Gigabyte board instead, with the USB 3 goodies
that builtin board sucks balls as its just a softwre card.....
Remember this is the SAME company that fired the team that made the highly profitable Flight Simulator series.
When it comes to games stuff gets pulled for random reasons all the time. Most game makers tho seem to be moving on to OpenAL.
Do we all miss the days of EAX? Yes... However its time to move on in my opinion.