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Soundcard?

V

vephs

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 19, 2005
Messages
81
Hey guys, I am going to get some nice headphones sometime soon, and i was wondering if using a soundcard would be worth it. The soundcard im mainly looking at is the chaintech av-710, would this be a lot better than my ac-97 onboard sound? I heard somewhere that the 2.1 capabilities of the av-710 is really good for its price, and i was wondering whether it would be worth it to get it. thanks for the help
 
pretty much any soundcard is better then any intergrated soundcard.

I have a dfi motherboard, the n4 one, and the soundcard or lack there of lol, that came with it, is suppose to be pretty up there, for onboard sound, and it stuck on ice.

I got a Soundblaster Audigy 2 zs for a good price, love it. I will go up higher later, but for now, something like that, or even weaker, will do wonders, then onboard
 
strid3r said:
Ripped from Ben's:

Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit for $49.99 - $40 rebate = $9.99. It has a option for free shipping if you get to $50. I added a couple of batteries in there for a couple bucks. There was also tax on my order. Here's the link to the card:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2112030

This would probably be a nice alternative to the Chaintech AV-710. (Refer to my sig for further reference. :D )
Click to expand...
From the Hot Deals thread :)
 
I just got the Chaintech AV-710 for Christmas, along with some speakers and a stereo receiver. The sound is in a completely different league from the onboard (I have the nforce2 ultra motherboard, so I guess it's Soundstorm?). I heard improvement even through my old crappy no-name speakers. E.g. I couldn't go past 10 o'clock without strong audible hiss when using onboard. With the AV-710, I had to turn the volume all the way up (that's 5 o'clock, starting at 7) to hear a barely audible static, most likely from the speakers' own little crappy amp. Clarity seemed to improve as well. Through my new speakers, it sounds simply great.

There was a thread here a while ago about this card. Some people mentioned bad driver problems. I had sound clipping in games when using the default driver WinXP assigned to the card. With updated drivers from ViaArena, the card performs flawlessly in both games and music. Just make sure you are using the high-def 2.0 (rear surround jack, the one next to the optical out). I didn't try the optical itself.

As you probably guessed, I'm really happy with the purchase, definitely worth 25 bucks.

*DUH... 3 spelling edits*
 
I have not had *much* experience with onboard audio as most of my computers always had some add-in sound card of some sort, but I can say onboard audio varies.

My dad's computer, which has onboard audio is not very good from what I have heard.
My laptop's onboard audio on the other hand isn't half bad. When I use foobar2000 into my Denon AVR685 receiver, I have a very hard time telling a diffrence between the onboard with an analog cable, and my Audigy 2 ZS with an optical connection when doing A/B tests with the same audio and same program.

Surprisingly though, for my laptop, when I listen to DVD movies I can tell a diffrence between the onboard audio and a PCMCIA audigy 2 card. Don't ask my why... but there is a big diffrence (the audigy 2 PCMCIA being better).

This is using 3 diffrent types of headphones, and a set of speakers for comparison.
 
I've got a dell d610 laptop and cannot use the onboard sound. It's unreal how noisy it is. Everything from fans/hard drive.. it all seems to come through the output. When I'm hooking up the headphones I use an audiotrak OPTOPLAY for sound. Has a built in headamp and doesnt require any extra driver installs. Also does optical out if you need it.
 
vephs said:
Hey guys, I am going to get some nice headphones sometime soon, and i was wondering if using a soundcard would be worth it. The soundcard im mainly looking at is the chaintech av-710, would this be a lot better than my ac-97 onboard sound? I heard somewhere that the 2.1 capabilities of the av-710 is really good for its price, and i was wondering whether it would be worth it to get it. thanks for the help
Click to expand...

If your going to game on your computer I would recommend the x-fi for the overall good sound experience.

However if its only going to be for music and movies I think the emu 0404 is the favorite of the headphone audiophiles
 
thanks for the help guys, i think im going to get the sblive for now and see if its good or not. If I can actually tell the difference between onboard audio and sblive then i might consider switching to one of the higher end cards (when i have enough money) :)
 
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