Sound card to improve on ALC887

harmattan

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 11, 2008
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I got a spanking deal (relative in these times) on a Gigabyte x570 Gaming X mobo. It's a solid board, but one of the areas they cut corners was on the audio chip, I/O and codec with only ACL887. Is there a sound card that will give me a bang-for-buck improvement? I'm not opposed to going used...

I use a range of headphones, some Bluetooth and wired, and a set of HiVi Swan M200MKII reference speakers). My main BT cans are Master&Dynamic MW60; wired cans are Denon AH-D5000s which drive well without any extra DAC or amp, but certainly could use something better than onboard.
 
If around $200 isn't too much. You can get an excellent solution with schiit. Modi usb dac and magni amp. Designed and made in California. That would be my buy.
 
If around $200 isn't too much. You can get an excellent solution with schiit. Modi usb dac and magni amp. Designed and made in California. That would be my buy.
Thanks, I've had schiit before and it's great stuff. However, I'm not looking for an external setup e.g. amp/dac, and even if I was I'd do best with an optical out which this mobo doesn't have. I'm just interested in an internal pci-e card that might improve on the onboard alc887 some.
 
Well then the creative sb z does fine for that. Or check out the head fi forums under computer audio.
 
I know you said no external, but schiit hel is a great dac amp combo with a mic amp input. That said, I was using a soundblaster AE-5 and was happy at the time with its quality over the motherboard sound, and was able to drive my 600ohm headphones as well.
 
I got a spanking deal (relative in these times) on a Gigabyte x570 Gaming X mobo. It's a solid board, but one of the areas they cut corners was on the audio chip, I/O and codec with only ACL887. Is there a sound card that will give me a bang-for-buck improvement? I'm not opposed to going used...

I use a range of headphones, some Bluetooth and wired, and a set of HiVi Swan M200MKII reference speakers). My main BT cans are Master&Dynamic MW60; wired cans are Denon AH-D5000s which drive well without any extra DAC or amp, but certainly could use something better than onboard.

Wireless headphones use their own audio CODEC. It doesn't have anything to do with the onboard audio. The ALC887 isn't really the problem. The main thing is that motherboard doesn't have an amplifier onboard. It also doesn't do impedance detection or anything like that.
 
When my HTPC onboard ALC892 packed it in I went and got a Xonar SE. It's got higher SNR than the onboard, 5.1 audio, headphone amp with configurable gain and an optical SPDIF output (which is what I needed). No driver issues that plagued early Xonars and it was inexpensive. Worth a shot if you don't want externals
 
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