Hardware & Technical If you don't use a discrete audio card, you should!

[Rankaze]

Man, was I blown away. Like many other people, I've always thought that the built-in audio on the motherboard would be more than sufficient for gaming and home entertainment usage. After all it supports the usual stuff - DTS, 5.1, etc etc. Why bother?

Well, recently the audio jacks seem to be acting up, randomly popping up "unplugged" and "plugged in" messages even though nothing had been done to them. So I disabled the on-board sound chip and got an Asus Xonar DSX (kinda mid-range I guess) PCIe sound card. Basically I just wanted to stop the annoying pop-ups and the sound skips when that happens, be it whether I am in a game or watching a movie. And I also wanted it to detect when I plug in a headset to the front jacks on the case.. The Asus card has connector pins for front case panel jacks.

When I started the PC up and test-played a couple of music MP3s and a game or 2, the difference was astounding... amazing....so clear, so rich... bass so deep... and the settings were all left at "default". I hadn't even started messing with them yet!

Now, I'm not recommending specifically getting the Asus board, but I'm just saying that maybe a discrete sound card should be on the shopping list. I know that I will keep using this card in my next PC and the one after etc etc until it dies (or a better one comes out and I get that one )

Thank you for this post. I ordered a Xonar DGX and it came in yesterday. The difference was immediately apparent. Everything sounds better; games, music, movies... best $25 I've spent in a while. I hear things in Elite I never noticed before.

I have a decent SLI mainboard but not a top-end one. I guess they skimped on the sound to provide the other features (which I should note, in fairness, are quite good for the price, so I don't mind needing a separate card for good sound)

Gonna be the oddball here.

As a musician and part-time audiophile, provided your motherboard has the actual connections required and can cope with the setup you intend to implement, I didn't really notice a difference implementing the discrete sound card.

Might be a particularly good mobo, or a particularly bog standard sound card, but the difference was minimal and possibly even placebo. Certainly not something I'd have dropped £80 just for the sound improvement.

Your mainboard must have better onboard sound than mine... in my case the difference was so dramatic my roommate was asking me what I changed - and she was in another room!

 

[Shadowdancer]

Many modern boards isolate the entire audio section from the rest of the PCB and have a metal shielding cap over the CODEC and DACs.

You still have it, by design, next to all kinds of high-frequency digital devices with their noisy power lines with the connectors stuffed between USB and SATA ports or if you're really unlucky next to WLAN parts, and then the audio section extends to the extension sockets; that cramped corner just is not a good place to put audio electronics. Line level parts are sometimes "acceptable" (so far I haven't encountered a board with line out I would have considered clean though), but once you start dealing with amplified headphone outputs and microphone inputs, the design compromises still tend to become quite apparent. Most of those issues just go away once you put those electronics outside the case.

I wonder how AOpen dealt with all the interference when they stuck a valve circuit on a mainboard.

 

[starman]

[video=youtube;w2DpLW374Sg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2DpLW374Sg[/video] back in the day.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Onboard audio: because putting sensitive analogue electronics built to the cheapest price possible inside a noisy environment without any shielding is a good idea.

My solution is a Behringer UCA-222; just disable the recording part and it's just about the best bang per currency unit one can IMAO get for "consumer audio" purposes. No dumb 3rd party drivers trying to crash your system, just plug it in and it works.

I can vouch for it. I have a few of them myself, plus its the same interface they use in my Xenyx mixer. The I/O is about as minimal as it gets, and it doesn't have dedicated drivers (so latency is a tad higher (few ms) when recording than with dedicated devices) but that is about it. Onboard preamps often dont drive headphones all that well, which becomes more noticable with higher quality headphones.

 

[Ian Skippy]

however, it doesn't have a microphone input and I don't know how good the headphone out is though, so if you need those, there may be other products that give you better value.

It is fine, it easily drives my AKG K271 Mk2. If people want to upgrade their mobile phone, check the FiiO series.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Gonna be the oddball here.

As a musician and part-time audiophile, provided your motherboard has the actual connections required and can cope with the setup you intend to implement, I didn't really notice a difference implementing the discrete sound card.

Might be a particularly good mobo, or a particularly bog standard sound card, but the difference was minimal and possibly even placebo. Certainly not something I'd have dropped £80 just for the sound improvement.

It really depends on the mobo. Proper mobos have perfectly fine onboard cards. The difference with pro soundcards is not that your music sounds better, but that it has superior I/O, lower recording latency and offers superior AD/DA convertors (your standard $50 mobo wont offer 24-bit/192kHz conversion).

As always: trust your ears. People tend to make a big noise about nothing to justify their hobby.

 

[bitstorm]

This thread.

I've discovered a whole world of expensive things I didn't know I needed.

DAC/AMP

Schiit Fulla 2 (best name), high quality headphone audio around £100 :

Fiio E10K DAC/AMP ~£60 :

 

[Shadowdancer]

I've discovered a whole world of expensive things I didn't know I needed.

Why is my snakeoil sense tingling?

There's a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall into. That Schiit part at least appears to be using decent, if woefully overrated parts. Sticking a 130MHz amplifier chip into an audio design is a good attempt to violate Maxim #37, but at least that thing won't distort ever as long as it's not clipping. So the funny thing is, the price tag may even be partly justified, but they could have built something working just as well for significantly less.

 

[winterknight]

This thread.

I've discovered a whole world of expensive things I didn't know I needed.

DAC/AMP

You could have chosen one of these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut8WHrh4ujI

 

[FoxTwo]

This thread.

I've discovered a whole world of expensive things I didn't know I needed.

DAC/AMP

Schiit Fulla 2 (best name), high quality headphone audio around £100 :

http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/schiit-fulla-2_1-758x426.png


Fiio E10K DAC/AMP ~£60 :

https://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/2000572417.jpeg

LOL sorry. I only created this thread cuz I was astounded and amazed at the difference an itty bitty US$ 60 (retailing for $99 in my country's currency) card did to the sounds on my PC. I certainly am no audiophile, nor did I actually think sounds played any important functions in games. What I mean is I'm Joe Casual... not really particularly fussed about sounds in games and music.

It was only the recent problems I had with my mobo's jacks that prompted me to search for a cheaper solution than "replace system board" to get the jacks to stop being annoying. Turned out the "cheap solution" (relatively) actually improved the sounds on my PC so I thought I'd share.