USB sound solutions - decent or junk?

A

AshleyG

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 5, 2007
Messages
272
I got tired of dealing with the constant little things with by board's onboard sound - pops, crackles, static - and bought myself a SoundBlaster X-fi Go! Pro to act as an intermediary solution until I could save up for something more robust. It's definitely doing well for its purpose (light gaming, music listening) without the issues the Realtek onboard sound was causing.

After this positive experience, I'm considering lowering my price range (I was going to buy a Titanium HD) and getting the new X-Fi HD external sound solution instead (only $99). The ability to have a line-in capable device I can carry with me and hook up to my laptop when working with external mixing boards just seems nice.

Would I be throwing money away going the USB route? I love high-quality audio but will probably never have the money to get the audiophile speakers or headphones, so will something along this line fit the bill?
 
I've been looking into a USB setup as well. Seems like its primarily geared towards gaming for USB setups.

If you're into high quality audio then you should pick up some "real" headphones.
 
I'll go ahead and say that the X-Fi Go! Pro is miles ahead of the Realtek onboard solution in terms of sound quality. I'm surprised by how much better things sound.
 
USB sound solutions are actually how audiophiles get their music. Using an external USB/DAC is the prefered method when using a computer as a audio transport. When you get into USB/DAC's you can get pricey very fast. The best thing to do is track down a DAC/Amp with USB capability so everything is contained within the same box. Using USB bypasses the internals of your computer and comunicates a bit perfect stream to the external DAC. Many times using a USB DAC requires some setup because you have to isolate the stream from the windows kernel mixer, which tampers with all audio leaving the computer. See below for some options.

Options:

HeadAmp Pico USB DAC
http://www.headamp.com/pico/index.htm

Fubar USB DAC
http://www.audiophileproducts.com/
 
Blk02 said:
USB sound solutions are actually how audiophiles get their music. Using an external USB/DAC is the prefered method when using a computer as a audio transport. When you get into USB/DAC's you can get pricey very fast. The best thing to do is track down a DAC/Amp with USB capability so everything is contained within the same box. Using USB bypasses the internals of your computer and comunicates a bit perfect stream to the external DAC. Many times using a USB DAC requires some setup because you have to isolate the stream from the windows kernel mixer, which tampers with all audio leaving the computer. See below for some options.

Options:

HeadAmp Pico USB DAC
http://www.headamp.com/pico/index.htm

Fubar USB DAC
http://www.audiophileproducts.com/
Click to expand...

Those are good products, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that USB is the preferred method to transmit audio.

USB in it's design is not a very good transport for digital audio at all. It has no guarantee on signal timing and will add a lot of jitter to the audio signal which will mess with the overall quality of the sound. Only very expensive DACs with USB have the appropriate circuitry to re-clock the signal and eliminate this jitter. Boht the examples here wont do this when using USB as the input.

For budget audiophile DACs it's much more preferred to use S/PDIF to transmit the audio as the jitter problem wont be nearly as bad as with USB.

Real audiophile DACs though whether they use USB or S/PDIF will re-clock the signal anyways to remove all jitter.
 
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