ON board Sound card or PCI-E one

[Abburo]

Yes sobek, my bad. I did not do the full Aureal3D/Vortex engine description which actually uses Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF), Doppler and distance modeling cues and filters.

 

But the "boulderdash" is quite new for me ;)

Edited December 23, 2013 by Abburo

[danilop]

Surround headphones are gimmick.

 

I wish that video from Tech Syndicate took on this HUGE issue because it's the biggest BS of them all in computer audio land. Basically they manipulate phase of certain part of audio spectrum to give false sense of "surround" sound. Proper surround sound begins with 3+ microphone recording and goes from there. Alternatively you put your stereo signal through surround processor (some kind of spacial enhancer like reverb or like). The biggest catch is the reproduction - you have to use proper surround sound speaker setup to recreate subtle time differences captured by surround microphone array. And speaker setup and microphone array aragement HAVE to mach each other. There is no way to reproduce this on stereo headphones - even surround headphones with multiple speakers rely on simple phase manipulation to achive "surround", which is plain cheating.

 

As Sobek said, the only proper way to have spatial sense when listening on the headphones (stereo signal) is binaural auido. You can experiment with it using couple of small omni directional microphones strap on to your ears. Each microphone pick up subtle difference in timing of the source sound wave (in very similar way to how our ears work) and that gives pretty accurate spatial effect when reproduced over the headphones.

 

Or you can use this if you have loads of money :):

 

Edited December 23, 2013 by danilop

[sobek]

It's not only the time differences. Human ears each have unique (to each person and even each saparate pinna) three dimensional transfer functions which the brain of the respective human is trained to. The transfer functions have characteristic notches that move in the spectrum according to the sound source. The brain intuitively decodes that information and delivers you with a sense of direction.

 

If you use interaural time difference only, what you will get is what is called a cone of confusion, that is, the listener will locate the source anywhere on a a cone extending from the ear where the time difference would be identical. The brain needs the spectral cues to be able to further pinpoint a source.

Edited December 23, 2013 by sobek

[danilop]

Which is why they equalize sound (beside phase manipulation) to approximate for human physiology (with cheap digital EQ). So the results and so called "surround" headphones are always horrible. :D

 

It's not only the time differences. Human ears each have unique (to each person and even each saparate pinna) three dimensional transfer functions which the brain of the respective human is trained to. The transfer functions have characteristic notches that move in the spectrum according to the sound source. The brain intuitively decodes that information and delivers you with a sense of direction.

 

If you use interaural time difference only, what you will get is what is called a cone of confusion, that is, the listener will locate the source anywhere on a a cone extending from the ear where the time difference would be identical. The brain needs the spectral cues to be able to further pinpoint a source.

Edited December 23, 2013 by danilop

[BitMaster]

Hey,

 

some of my friends are professional musicians with studio equipment etc.. ..and mostly using older Macs for many reasons regarding noise, distortion and physical-link quality.

 

None of the sound blaster cards fulfill their needs when it comes to music, not even the new Macs as they have a combined in/out jack which they all hate.

 

From my point of view, yes, a dedicated decent SB card is what a gaming rig should have but modern onboard chips actually do the same in general. Those times when the game stuttered because of your Cirrus Logic onboard crappy chipset are long gone... most decent onboard cards also have EAX and THX. My last Dell XPS 1730 had a special code to enable the feature in the chipset/driver and my Asus G73 has it all too incl. EAX 5.0 and THX. The MacBPro I am using is running a newer Cirrus chip afaik and sound is the least of my problems. Enuff for gaming and my headphones ( standard iPhone headphones, single 3.5mm stereo/mike jack :( )

 

It does matter what card I use when I hook it up to my High-End Yamaha Pre-Amp/Power-Amp @ Infinity 8.1 speakers combo that has a 0.0002 % distortion factor. There you here each and every weakness of your combo when playing the right song in best quality ( Pink Floyd etc... Platinum Edition CDs etc., or high quality digital rip ). None of the cards or Laptops I have can really convince me of their quality on a high end Stereo system.

You can hear the weakness of bad conductors, signal resistance and the speed the signal spikes.

I dunno the exact english words but the links and silver solder etc.. play a high role when u want to tune your system to high fidelity.

 

For ultra clean sound a SB card is not what you want, check those Yamaha prof. studio cards etc.. but the price tag is 500+... :( .. or the new Thunderbolt driven cards... heck...thats into the future too far haha

 

 

I would stick to SkateZilla's advice and get me one of his recommended cards for gaming. That tip of him is real good ( Dell-ebay combo ). Just don't expect studio quality sound on a high-end setup.

 

And yes...SB has been famous for their driver ignorance. I remember the days of SB ISA cards and SB 16 PCI cards...and the long way till what they offer today. The drivers for new OS`s have always been a problem and I came to the point to believe that they wanna sell you a new card for every new OS since they refuse to update their older drivers/cards to new OS`s. That left a bad taste in my mouth over the years when thinking of Creative Labs Inc. .

 

If I am gonna built me gaming rig, I would check to have that chip right on my board to spare the slot. There are not many slots available once you put in SLI and a PCIe SSD, actually, those 3 cards may be all you can plug in. So a good onboard sound is a must since their is no free slot available anymore..and even if it does, it may well share the wrong IRQ/PCIe lane(s) and your gains are maybe voided if you try to eliminate each and every sound stutter. Knowing how PCIe lanes work should be considered when plugging in cards... Those days of sharing lanes and thus causing bottlenecks and delays are NOT over ! By all means they aren't.

 

Concluding, try to get a mobo with a high end chipset with as many PCIe lanes as you can afford, usually those are i.e. Asus Workstation boards. Avoid bottlenecks wherever you can but stay on the ground with investments, many of them are marketing hypes and are mainstream a year after for ⅓ of the price.

 

*Just had my pro-musician on the phone, he stated that all those onboard sounds sounds and SB cards are unusable for them, the only thing that used to work were Macs before 2011 or so when they had decent jacks that had no distortion. Yamaha card(s) is what they use mainly and they bitch about the new Macs with the unhappy combo-jack solution since it produces so much noise that they need to attach a Firewire/USB/Thunderbolt external card ( Yamaha usually ) to make recordings, costing 500-1.500 bucks for such an external add-on.

 

Bit

[SkateZilla]

I use my card with studio equipment with no problems.

[Bucic]

Well, i think you missed the point they were making. Read up on binaural audio and HRTFs if you're interested. I don't think it can fully replace surround, but it definately has some strong merits.

 

Binaural effects can be achieved not only through recording with an artificial head, you can also add that in a sound rendering engine by folding sound sources with the transfer functions that are related to the direction they are coming from. Many games have incorporated this successfully in the past.

I started reading this thread thinking that stereo headphones can give only so-so directional audio. Apparently I was wrong. Thank you sobek! It also led me here

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gaming#HRTF_filters_with_OpenAL

so another thanks!

 

I still don't agree with the teksyndicate guys re integrated audio chips. I don't know whether it's still true with the current gen chips but around 2004-2010 the problem with nutless sound (no bass) on onboard audio was very common. Just check out forum archives. And I am not an audiophile. The chips literally made everything sound like through a telephone speaker! I had the problem with two different mobos of two different manufacturers. Both chips were made by Realtek. Since then I simply avoid Realtek and even knowing that it was ~10 years ago with my future PC build I will simply buy a $60 ASUS audi card and be done with it, as checking whether integrated audio are fine nowadays is not worth the stress for me.

 

The whole discussion also made me ralize how common bad audio environment is in contemporary games. 2013 and there's plenty of games still sporting nothing more than stereo panning! Talk about progress...

[Bucic]

One more thing. When facing a choice between a Creative and ASUS soundcard think twice before going for Creative known for its predatory actions against competition. See the story of Aureal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor#History

Edited April 6, 2014 by Bucic

[leafer]

You've certainly convinced me to get a Xonar. :D

[Bucic]

Somewhat related

On 3D positional HRTF audio etc.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=2035898

[Bucic]

IMO It all boils down to - onboard are hit or miss (even using same audio chip) while dedicated are guaranteed to perform perfectly. Onboard are like smartphones. You never know when you'll get one with quirky sound and bass castrated.

[SkateZilla]

IMO It all boils down to - onboard are hit or miss (even using same audio chip) while dedicated are guaranteed to perform perfectly. Onboard are like smartphones. You never know when you'll get one with quirky sound and bass castrated.

 

TBH, the issue is Driver Compiling,

VIA/Realtek make one Massive Universal Driver for their chip classes.

 

Mainboard Manufacturer's modify the Driver to enable/disable features they included in their Mainboard Chipset and re-compile them. Which is why most of the time, the mainboard driver from their Mainboard manufacturer is better than the newer drivers you get from the chip manufacturer.

 

You can have Dedicated Audio Cards that perform worse than on-board, them Cheapo $10 off brand cards they sell on eBay or in cheap PC Stores usually fit that category.....

I've dealt with some cheap $10 "7.1 Surround" Cards when re-pairing customer systems, and in the end they were more problems than they were worth due to drivers.

 

That being said, Creative/ASUS/Turtle Beach, have had their share of Driver issues as well.

[xxJohnxx]

If I am allowed to ask, how does this look with todays video cards? They usually are able to output the audio as well (over HDMI/Display Port) and I have used my NVIDIA card to output audio over the HDMI cable to the audio receiver. Could I get better results with onboard equipment or is the graphics card doing that just fine?

[SkateZilla]

AFAIK, with AMD for Example, and it's prolly the same for nVidia.

The Audio over HDMI, is just a Software Driver Passthrough,

The Audio is still processed by your Onboard or discrete processor, then routed through your Video Card's HDMI Output instead or along with your Sound Card Outputs.

 

Unless you're using AMD's "TrueAudio", In which case the audio is rendered for each screen individually using the GPU and outputted by the GPU to each screen,

Which requires a Hawaii/GCN2.0 GPU and Supported Application.

 

I've played with it before while building other systems, Having each screen have it's own audio channel is nice for conferences, but for games, it's still pretty much a gimmick.

You simply don't need 6 forward channels.

Edited June 2, 2014 by SkateZilla

[docfu]

I was going to ask the exact same thing. I use my nVidia 550 TI to drive my 55" LG via HDMI. Not using sound cables of any kind and since the signal is 100% digital and theoretically noise-free then buying a soundcard should technically...be a downgrade...due to the inherent noise inside the PC case...

 

Comments? I honestly can't justify buying a soundcard after that...

[SkateZilla]

I was going to ask the exact same thing. I use my nVidia 550 TI to drive my 55" LG via HDMI. Not using sound cables of any kind and since the signal is 100% digital and theoretically noise-free then buying a soundcard should technically...be a downgrade...due to the inherent noise inside the PC case...

 

Comments? I honestly can't justify buying a soundcard after that...

 

Just because you use a Digital Transport doesn't mean you're not gonna get noise

-There's still interference that can be picked up by the Audio Chip, Discrete or Onboard.

-There's still components that can receive interference (again, Discrete or Onboard).

-There's still DACs that can receive interference in the Screen or in the PC.

 

The Audio maybe Digital from your GPU's Passthrough, through the HDMI and at you'r LCD's HDMI Input.

 

But Most Screens still use small Analog Speakers, so there's a DAC in the screen itself.

 

And like I said, it's a Passthrough, the Audio Processing is still done on you're onboard Audio processor (Via or Realtek mostly), in which case is prolly able to receive outside noise.

 

The main reason I use a Discrete Audio Processor is because:

-I can Shield the Card from EMI,

-The Discrete Processor had significantly better SnR than almost every On-Board Solution,

-The Hardware may not be used by Games to RENDER the Audio, But EQ Adjustments and Simulated Sound Effects (EAX, Reverb, Bass Redirect, etc) is all done by the Audio Processor,

-Using Onboard Solutions from VIA/RealTek, off load that work the software driver / CPU Thread. (Even when using "XFi for Realtek" software).

Edited June 2, 2014 by SkateZilla

[sobek]

Just because you use a Digital Transport doesn't mean you're not gonna get noise

 

Well you are a loooooong way better off using digital signals. It's also much easier to shield digital equipment (with regard to audio at least). Once the audio is packed into a decent protocol, there's redundancy there that will take a lot of interference without showing any artifacts.

 

-There's still DACs that can receive interference in the Screen or in the PC.

 

True, but that's still less prone to interference than running the (in a non-pro environment typically asymmetrical) analog line through your room to the speaker (symmetrical lines are far less prone to interference).

 

 

But Most Screens still use small Analog Speakers, so there's a DAC in the screen itself.

 

A speaker can NOT be driven with a digital signal.

 

You ALWAYS need an analogue signal to drive your speaker and that means that you need a DAC and an analogue power amplifier. The benefit from using digital transfer to your speakers versus quality analogue equipment and balanced lines is not relevant, however since consumer products rarely offer balanced audio, digital lines may offer a significant improvement depending on the environment.

 

And like I said, it's a Passthrough, the Audio Processing is still done on you're onboard Audio processor (Via or Realtek mostly), in which case is prolly able to receive outside noise.

 

Once the signal is digital, there is hardly any way to add noise apart from the processing (requantisation errors, etc).

Edited June 2, 2014 by sobek

[SkateZilla]

I just like to be mr. doom and gloom, lol...

Edited June 2, 2014 by SkateZilla

[sobek]

I should prolly add that there can be huge quality differences in drivers and processing algorithms, of course. The "good" part of the spectrum can usually not be found on low end equipment. :)

 

Coming back to docfu's question, i'd say it largely depends on the DAC and amplifier that are inside the screen. You can write a beautiful essay and give it to a moron, it will be pearls befor swine, figuratively speaking. If your monitor speakers are morons, the "noise free" digital signal from your graphics card isn't doing much for you. On the other hand, if they are pretty good (well by my standards it's pretty unlikely that they are but i digress), then it's probably true that in your case, a separate audio card won't do much for you in terms of signal to noise ratio.

Edited June 2, 2014 by sobek

[leafer]

Why are you a "Fangirl Goddess"?

[docfu]

Thanks. I probably won't rush out and buy a soundcard then but i'll think about it if I see something cheap on sale I'll think about it. Although really a better graphics card gets priority then....

[LFCChameleon_Silk]

unless your running a recording studio the really whats the point of an expansion card all the heavy lifting gets offloaded to the cpu regardless so anything about fps being improved could only ever be the slightest improvement.

 

having said that i still dislike anything onboard or integrated (a ritual/grudge that i must hold on to after all those crappy SiS chipsets i had to deal with troubleshooting problems on computers owned by friends)

[Bucic]

I should prolly add that there can be huge quality differences in drivers and processing algorithms, of course. The "good" part of the spectrum can usually not be found on low end equipment. :)

 

Coming back to docfu's question, i'd say it largely depends on the DAC and amplifier that are inside the screen. You can write a beautiful essay and give it to a moron, it will be pearls befor swine, figuratively speaking. If your monitor speakers are morons, the "noise free" digital signal from your graphics card isn't doing much for you. On the other hand, if they are pretty good (well by my standards it's pretty unlikely that they are but i digress), then it's probably true that in your case, a separate audio card won't do much for you in terms of signal to noise ratio.

And you won't be getting your money back if the drivers suck. That was my point.

 

BTW, does anyone of you recall the problem with NO bass with integrated Realtek audio circa 2005?

[Bucic]

An interesting test - onboard sound signal quality tested with RightMark audio analyzer

http://techreport.com/review/24316/zotac-z77-itx-wifi-mini-itx-motherboard-reviewed/7

 

Please post links to similar tests of onboard audio if you've found something like this.