Peripherals So, you know that expensive soundcard you just bought?.....

As others have said, from what I know amplification is a big factor, especially with headphones.
Using onboard sound severely limits you in that respect.

 

I will never buy that onboard sound card is as good as a discrete, when the difference on the all of the machines I've ever had is night and day using a discrete over onboard - but I'm willing to accept that's due to the amps/speakers - but still, even if that's the case, how can one argue that the onboard is "as good" as the discrete when tested with decent outboard...it's not.

 

I recently had a play about with my media rig and popped the DX out of it and fired up my B&W 601's with onboard on a B75 board.

It sounded bloody awful in comparison, don't care what tomshardware says!

 

The onboard chip I use in the Crosshair V FZ sounds odd. Like it has some sort of weird separation. It also bombs when I use my headphones and the bass kicks in. The rest of the sound becomes quieter.

I used the weird software with it and it just destroyed the sound tbh. The XFI was far more powerful when driving my speakers and my headphones. Sadly it just doesn't want to work which I put down to Windows 8 in the end. I've not binned it just yet I'm going to try it in Windows XP where hopefully it will work OK and provide me with lovely music through my headphones when I work on graphical stuff (which is what this workstation is going to be for).

As I say I saw a video on Youtube comparing all three (Realtek Creative and Asus) and they all sounded completely different.



That's it there..

 

For general usage and in gaming with headsets onboard is plenty for most and the difference when using a headset is basically nothing as the headset is usually worse quality than the sound card.

If your a high end audiophile with the latest sound equipment there's going to be a difference.

 

An AKG K701, which is more affordable now than 10 years ago (200€ vs 500€), will sounds like $h!t with onboard. I know this is a pretty picky and hard to drive headphone, but regardless of that you'll hear all artifacts and parasites your onboard produces.

I know this is considered as an high-end headphone, but many gamers spends more than the asked 200€ in headsets that are light-years behind in term of sound quality.

 

Most gamers spend about £10 on a headset, Even people playing Pro are only using £100 stuff that they got given. Very few people own a high end audio headset and a seperate mic despite it been the best way to go about it.

A small miniority will own a high end headset and a high end seperate mic which is the best way to spend £300. Even on enthusiast forums the sound card and headset is the bit of the build that gets cheaped on the most.

Most do not even own speakers these days.

 

Only reason I bought my sound card is that it's easy to go in my headset our my sp2500 speakers just with a click of a button.

 

OMG That video is the pits. Those guys don't have frikkin' clue what they are talking about.

To link frequency range and sampling rate together as the same thing is a real school boy error. Just because they can be linked verbally to does not mean they are similar.

It's just like people who don't understand dimensions, pixels and dpi when talking about scaling bitmap images.

If you understand the basics of the subject it is impossible to make an accurate conclusion.

 

This. What an utter crock of nonsense. If you're going to debate a topic at least get your core facts right. It almost raises the suspicious of intentional trolling it's that wrong - I don't mean with regards to it's core message, that's irrelevant, more with regards to the explanation and the fact's upon which they're basing the message.

- Perhaps if you want anyone to take you seriously when you're talking about such a hotly debated topic, you shouldn't kick off saying you're going to "dispel some myths" and berating the opponents of your opinions.
- Sample rate != frequency range! Just... wow.
- "As soon as you go from 44khz down to 22khz, it sounds like you're on a phone"... but I thought the human ear can only hear up to 20khz? How does that work then?
- Oh wait, now the human ear can hear up to 20,000 khz? Try again, moron.
- Right, so now you're saying that you can't tell the difference between 44khz and 44khz up-sampled to 96 or 192khz? I thought we were talking about native high-res recordings? I'm so confused.
- "Tubes have a warm sound and are good for bass, but do very bad things to your audio and distort things so much that it sounds good"... preposterous generalisation.
- "There are a million benefits in solid state over tubes"... also a preposterous generalisation, but go on, I'm counting.
- "All that the "class" letter means on amp design is the efficiency of the circuit"... hmm, okay, I'm listening...
- "Solid state amps produce no heat at all" curious...
- "Solid state does not distort the music at all"... I wonder what THD means on these amps specs sheets... of wait, I forgot, numbers don't matter.
- "Vinyl either sounds better or a CD, or it doesn't." Wow! Thanks for that insight!
- "good thing about vinyl is that it's recorded in 24-bit"... but you just pointed out that vinyl was an analogue medium. And you also previously stated that HR audio is pointless... right
- Wanton substitution of "byte" and "bit" throughout
- "Cables... don't buy them"... wireless all round then, check
- "XLR cables are just marketing", "just a different connector"... Wow. Whether you can hear a difference or not is one thing, but they're entirely different! If you think a balanced cable/connection makes no difference, I suggest you try taking one of each pair from your ethernet cables and seeing how that works... Oh, sorry, no cables, I forgot, they must be using wi-fi.
- "you have two lefts, a balanced ground, a neutral, two rights"... ????
- Again linking quality to cost... because it's always linear, right?
- "you probably won't be watching this video if you knew what electrostatic was"... right then, I best switch off.

... ok I lied, I carried on...

- "I don't really want to plug my own products here"... but I'm going to anyway, now things become much more clear!
- "some of the differences you can quantify scientifically"... but wait, I thought earlier on the other guy said that numbers don't matter in audio?


... Sorry, running commentary kind of got out of hand...

 

I was going to try a comparison but I don't think my motherboard has a line out...

Through the integrated headphone amp it sounds pretty poor, a bit like music on my phone.

 

This is much better, people who talk sense

 

So we are now back to where we started, everyone claiming they can tell the difference, despite blind tests showing otherwise.

Until everyone conducts their own blind tests though, it's really nothing more than hearsay versus results showing the opposite.

 

There's no arguing science as much as people like to. It really is as simple as that.

If an onboard sound chip is able to match the capabilities of a discrete sound card then that's that really. What I mean is if you have a look here -

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/31/creative_xfi/6

We can see how sound cards are truly judged. I remember looking up the original Realtek onboard a couple of months ago and reading the results and the THD was rated as poor. This, of course, makes a huge difference to the sound. However, I was assured that the more recent Realtek chips could produce audio just as well as any add in sound card.

The thing is I'm not silly enough to argue with science. If a sound card is hooked up to a device and then scientifically tested and comes back with satisfactory results then there's no argument. However, whilst these sound cards may all produce satisfactory results there are differences in manufacturing. So each can sound different (not better, just different) which leaves us with the good old freedom of choice.

I used to work for a company called Rogers back in the 1990s making speakers for the BBC. We used to make the LS35a and the Ls59 among others (Studio 3 etc). These speakers were made to spec, and, were tested to be within spec.

I used to argue until I was blue in the face with people over the need for £200 interconnects for example. The thing is I was absolutely right too,a decent set of gold plated Tandy leads were every bit as good as any cable.

Some people though will think they can tell a difference. Me? I don't like my onboard sound chip but it's nothing to do with the fact that it's bad or an add in card is different, I just like the sound of the Creative card better.

And that's most certainly because the Creative card has a louder output and thus when turned up produces a more powerful sound that drives music better.

 

I did a blind test on two DAC's, Xonar STX and Phobia, and Supreme XF onboard.

We used £80 headphone and £300 headphones (Sennheiser HD650)

Tested MP3 and FLAC and in game.

We all agreed in the testing, that the sound quality was unnoticeable different across all the sound chips. What we did find was that the DAC's handled volume much better than all the sound cards as the AMP hardware within them was much better well isolated.
You can tell the sound cards struggled particularly with the expensive headphone going pass 2/3 volume, and the sound quality suffered. Where you could crank the DAC's up to max and they would still sound crystal clear and pleasant to listen too.

you can come up with what ever graphs you like so try and justify paying stupid money of sound cards. but at the end of the day its real world testing that matters.

 

I actually lean more towards the "snake oil" mindset (in that in my opinion, way too much of the audio stuff out there is just that). But that said, no test results are going to convince me that my on-board audio didn't hiss. I don't need to convince anyone else of this, or need to confirm to myself through testing that this was the case, so I didn't conduct any blind test. Not that conducting any form of test would have changed anyone else's opinion anyway.

I felt the need to pick the YouTube video apart in an attempt to discredit it not because I agree or disagree with its conclusions, but because its argument is poorly put together and in many areas based on nonsense.

Something I would like to see more, if people do insist on publishing articles to either prove or disprove that X, Y or Z makes audio sound better, is a control test in blind testing. E.g. maybe the same music that's heavily (and unarguably noticeably) compressed, in mono etc, to pick out the anti-placebo (in that the listener can't hear a difference because they don't want to). Not that this would convince anyone either, would just make for an interesting read.

TL;DR: Live and let live. The non-believers can sit there feeling smug that they've been frugal with a garden-variety setup that sounds great and the believers can sit there feeling smug knowing that they have spent £100k so it sounds great - why the need to call each other out?

(EDIT: and before anyone says, I'm calling out the YouTube guys not because of their opinion, but because of their misinformation)

 

Off topic, but I've got a set of LS55's (I think they're 55's) in the attic. Great sounding speakers.

Personally, I'm a lot happier listening to audio through my U7 soundcard than the on-board - scientific or not, it's a lot clearer. I hated music through the on-board, it didn't matter how good the source file was, it always sounded clipped and could never give you that "shiver down your spine" feeling. To get that feeling back, I switched to a separate card.

 

Very popular model

If you ever get to look at them PM me with the initials on the check sticker and I'll tell you who passed your speakers off

Some very happy times working there and man we were treated well (had our own canteen free lunch breakfast etc).

Sadly they sold up to the Japs and that was that. They closed us down and moved it overseas

 

Knowing very little about audio, it worries me that low inpedance headphones show such a low damping factor (I don't know what this means) when connected to a soundcard, as this is a similar setup to what I have (Xonar DX / Audio Technica AD900s). Can anyone tell me I'm worring about nothing please?

 

I can live with Realtek ALC898 onboard sound through my £20 Koss PortaPro headphones. I'm Nick, I'm not an audiophile.

But for the money, my setup can hold its own