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Looking into sound cards, finding myself out of date
I've been thinking of getting a soundcard to replace the onboard Asus riser on my Crosshair III, but I find myself confused on a lot of points, both because I find myself uncomfortably ignorant and because I haven't even been on the market for such hardware since I bought my SB Audigy 2 years ago for my XP gaming rig.
This is primarily going to be used for gaming, and, depending on the options, blu-ray playback on my PC.
Anyways, I'm confused about the important of EAX support in sound cards. I'm looking at either something like the Creative X-fi Titanium or the Asus Xonar DX. I've heard the Xonar has better sound quality, but there's no real EAX support (the emulation is apparently miserable). Is this even something to consider? With Windows XP and Directsound long gone, do I even have to worry about EAX support with OpenAL being the standard in Windows now? I'm mainly thinking down the road (only a few games I have now have real EAX support anyways).
My second question is regarding blu-ray playback. If possible, I'd like to get access to the lossless audio over my PC speakers, but of course none of the sound cards even mention HDCP, let alone any kind of Dolby-TruHD or DTS-HD decoding. I'm I just out of luck there? Is it possible to have it somehow play as LPCM and then have the cards play that over the analog jacks?
Again, unfortunately these are things I haven't looked into in years, and I was never that well versed in them to begin with, so any help would be appreciated.
Comments
man, ya know I havnt shopped for sound cards in years. Sounds like you're wanting something way above what id consider shopping for.
I was actually debating going to an onboard sound solution for my next build and was also concerned about eax. I guess I should start paying attention to what games offer eax and which ones dont. Im afraid its going to be one of those things that once I dont have it, I wouldnt have realized how much I use it.
Well I did some research, and FINALLY found some answers, so hopefully it'll work out.
EAX is basically useless, and all games just use other approaches now to directional audio for the most part. Crysis just chunked out all the math for positional audio in its own software, no wonder it was so intensive
For blu-ray, it's just good player software that decodes the lossless audio (just like Windows Media Player decodes my Dolby Digital Plus tracks now). So that's all good.
I sprung for the Asus Xonar DX, which was down from 89.99 to 59.99 on Newegg (after MIR). It should be here any time now, so I hope it works out well, especially because I'm about to replace these Logitech X-530 speakers with Z-5500s (or Z-680s if I can find them; they're usually a heck of a lot cheaper).
I am heavily into music and sound engineering
The problem with sound cards in any form is that while the aim is to hear good sound in games, unfortunately most game music is of low quality. To make it sound "better" than normal, companies load up sound cards with EQ + Effect programs. Sound Cards also deal with a lot of inteference in electronics, which also bend the sound from 44.1khz (CD SOUND) to 48khz which changes things. Sound Cards are all about buying a discreet solution which has a good DAC. DAC means "Digital to Analog Converter"
Catamount...If you have to choose between 2 sound cards which are at the same range (low, mid or high range) then look at Signal To Noise Ratio. This is the most important thing next to the DAC. If the ratio is higher than 1 : 1, it means you will deal with background noise. You want the lowest possible ratio between Signal and Noise to minimize background noise.
Once you do this, then you can go after your speaker + sub configuration along with positioning.
Notice I haven't spoken about EAX and the extra sound technologies. I am speaking of sound itself....and what is natural. ^_^ Not how companies sugar coat things. If you want a lesson on Sound, I can give you a good one later.
My Singing voice range is 4.5 Octaves ^_^
Thank you for the good information; it's basically the same thing I found looking around various audio forums after fighting with Google to give me relevant results ^_^;
Aside from being on sale for a cheap price (and being generally cheap anyways), the Xonar DX has a pretty good SNR, though the DACs on front jacks were not quite matched on the rest of the channels unfortunately (cutting the cost of the Xonar D2X in half took cutting a couple of corners
). It's 116dB on the front, and 112 on the center side and rear. The other card I was looking at was the Auzentech Bravura, which (also using similar Cirrus Logic DACs) had 114dB SNR on all channels. It was $129 to the Xonar's $79 though, and I didn't need the headphone amp.
Unfortunately, I don't have an Auzentech and Creative card next to me for comparison, but the reviews I read said that, subjectively speaking, the Xonar DX sounded great, and at least compared to my integrated audio, it's proving to be true (and while it's making little difference in games in terms of quality, for the reasons you outline, the positional audio is good; it was lacking on my onboard in most games).
Like I said though, good info. It's good to know it's consistent with what I've read elsewhere (as it was the basis for my decision on what to purchase). Now to find some decent speakers... I'm tempted to fall back a generation because the speakers are literally a couple hundred less than the present generation (The Z-5500s), but it's hard finding one in good shape
I stopped using Sound Cards a long time ago for computers. They are just a gimmick these days..:(
I own a Hardware DAC from Germany that cost me around $200 and ran as a bypass to onboard sound feeding to my AMP and SUB, for 8 years it has beaten out top of the line cards used in recording. Im not talking about those $200 - $300 gaming sound cards but the ones used in professional recording computers.
Let me put it to you this way...The way PC and Console Game music is stored, arranged, remastered and compressed is so bad that you can buy a $50 Hardware DAC will tear apart any sound card out today as far as game music goes. Good luck finding oneand setting it up though...
Well even assuming one felt like hard-wiring in 4 $50 DACs (remember, it's a multi-channel setup), you still wouldn't get directional audio processing (some games do it solely in software, like Crysis, but many don't; I still play many games that use EAX 4 or 5). Not having proper directional audio support means that you lose the entire point of running a game on a surround system in the first place, as I've been doing since about 2004. You don't buy a soundcard for gaming to get clarity, not for the most part (even if anything seems to sound better than the onboard audio I have on half of my machines); you get it for positional audio. Playing FEAR or Bioshock on a pair of headphones or a 2-channel setup is alright, but it's nowhere near the same as playing it in 5.1/7.1 with proper position audio support.
At this point EAX is more or less dead, even if it will hang around for a bit in old people will continue to play, and while no one seems to know exactly what will step in to replace it, I find it likely that the prevalence of Dolby surround on consoles and the cross-platform nature of most titles will strongly push that as the replacement for EAX for positional audio. That would be ideal, given that this card supports that anyways, but mostly the card in gaming is just for holdover EAX titles (and what addiotional clarity does come from dumping the onboard sound).
As for when clarity really matters, that's more for music and lossless audio in blu-ray titles, and again, while I could hypothetically go through the trouble of spending $200 and setting up 4 DACs $50 manually for that, I'm sure I would be hard pressed, on any speaker system available for the PC, to tell the difference between that and the brown burr DACs in something like an Auzentech Prelude or Xonar D2X for that same amount of money, which is installed by doing little more than popping it into a slot, which I would say makes it the best option available.
Sound cards are niche hardware these days, going from modest ~$70 units for people who simply want something a little nicer than onboard audio, to $200-$300 cards for people with more serious needs from their audio system, but in all cases, I would hardly call them "gimicks".