Nameless Voice on 22/2/2011 at 18:38
The Asus Xonar DX (which is ~€65) does sound good, though I notice that no sound cards in that range have electromagnetic shielding, which makes me wonder if my interference issue will remain even with a dedicated card?
baeuchlein on 22/2/2011 at 19:53
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
These days, I have actually decent headphones (a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones), and I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile getting a real, dedicated sound card too. If for no other reason than to get rid of that annoying very faint "bzzzt" I can hear through my built-in Realtek card when the computer scrolls webpages or does certain CPU-heavy tasks.
My onboard C-Media sound device produces similar sounds, although these can be quite loud. A few weeks ago I found out that both the CD-IN-input as well as the AUX-IN-input were the real source of this. Both are connected to optical drives, and in both cases other drives may produce louder or fainter distortions. Since I do not use the drives as an Audio CD player anymore, I have turned off these two inputs in the sound mixer (AKA Windows' Volume Control), and now the remaining sound is okay.
I have only a bit of experience concerning onboard sound devices (there are only three of them which I used for a longer period of time), but from what I experienced with these over the years, I believe that many onboard sound chips are not as good as "real" sound cards. Whether this means that you have to buy another "real" sound card is another question, though - I have compared my onboard sound chips to several real sound cards I own, and only one of the three onboard chips I endured was turned off and replaced by a sound card. The other ones are inferior to most of my sound cards, but only concerning some rather special functions (such as
recording sound).
Try getting rid of your buzzing sound without buying anything first. If that doesn't work, a "real" sound card might be worth paying for. On the other hand... some additional experiments with this USB sound thingy in your keyboard might yield something as well. Does it have a master volume control as well as volume controls for, e.g., PCM sound? If so, maybe you have to play with both volumes until you can fine-tune the overall output volume.
Concerning whether onboard sound chips are bad and "real" cards are "YAY"... I have had three lower-quality onboard sound chips, but a fourth one was definitely better (probably because it was sould as a stand-alone sound card as well). It's the other way round with sound cards: One is of noteably low quality, while the others are in the "okay" range. Since I'm not a musician, I won't notice much difference between high quality and "okay" quality anyway.;)
So it's generally a good idea to think of a "real" sound card if you want decent sound, but there are exceptions.
Matthew on 22/2/2011 at 21:15
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
The Asus Xonar DX (which is ~€65) does sound good, though I notice that no sound cards in that range have electromagnetic shielding, which makes me wonder if my interference issue will remain even with a dedicated card?
I don't think I've got a shield on my card (original Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty from ~ 2006) and I've never noticed a problem.
Nameless Voice on 22/2/2011 at 21:52
Hmm, the EM-shielded one they linked to in that article really
looked shielded ((
http://images.europe.creative.com//images/products/450x350/pdt_18869.png) pic).
baeuchlein: the CD audio is already disabled, unfortunately, and disabling digital input didn't make any difference.
As for the keyboard, the volume control in Windows 7 is so totally different from the one in XP that it doesn't even work that way any more. There aren't separate mixers for wave, midi, etc. anymore, but instead there are separate mixers for each program you are running.
I still need to experiment with the keyboard more; I think it has more background hiss than the onboard audio, but I may be imagining it, as the keyboard is louder...
I don't really know what this means, but it implies the Realtek has better audio quality:
Inline Image:
http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/3037/02222011222023.png(Somewhat unfair, since the Realtek's microphone was being used as input in both cases, that really should have gone into Line In instead, but I was too lazy to hunt behind the case.)
Al_B on 22/2/2011 at 23:32
What program did you use out of interest? You're right that the results show the realtek audio with better results but if the two tests were not comparable then that may not be definitive.
In any case, most soundcard noise that I've seen in the past has been power supply coupling rather than pickup so shielding is probably less important than it might at first appear. Motherboards are crammed with components and depending on layout it's easy for medium frequency noise to couple itself onto your sound output - giving interference when your hard drive or graphics card demands extra current.
Any reasonable sound card stands a better chance of dealing with such things. They can have better local decoupling / filtering of power supplies, use output components with improved supply rejection and are hopefully designed with noise in mind. That's not to say that a good motherboard won't be better than a poor sound card but you'll probably get an improved performance if you're struggling with your existing onboard sound.
Nameless Voice on 23/2/2011 at 00:02
Quote Posted by Al_B
What program did you use out of interest? You're right that the results show the realtek audio with better results but if the two tests were not comparable then that may not be definitive.
(
http://audio.rightmark.org/products/rmaa.shtml) RightMark Audio Analyser
The power supply is a likely enough cause, since things like scrolling might cause a sudden power spike, and things like heavy number-crunching while decompressing 7-zip archives certainly would. The motherboard is a halfway decent Gigabyte board, and the power supply is a decent Hiper model, so they're not the cheapest components, but not amazingly expensive (theoretically higher quality?) either.
Nameless Voice on 28/2/2011 at 14:08
Has anyone actually tried old games like Thief 2 or System Shock 2 with EAX on the Asus Xonar?
I'm coming across a lot of complaints about it not working right, or at all. Most old, but some very recent.
Like (
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&model=Xonar+DG&id=20110215120923443&page=1&SLanguage=en-us#20110218091300961) this one from a few days ago:
Quote:
I'm sure there is some functioning game title out there that I haven't tried, but so far I haven't found it. I've had to resort to running in Vista compatibility mode while under Win7 just to get hardware support in Painkiller. There is no EAX3 support, so that's never going to be an option. But the Hardware + HRTF modes and older EAX 1&2 options are available this way.
In system shock 2 hardware sound works briefly. With the UniDrivers it cuts out sounds, but never ALL sounds. Other games base on this engine exhibit similar failure. This is basic EAX that should have worked with GX 2.0! And how many new pieces of hardware have been released into the market with the same false advertising?
Other titles have various clicks, pops, and volume level extremes. Sometimes they just flat out won't run. Bioshock is either remarkably underwhelming with it's sound design, or Asus is rendering something very wrong(or not at all). I have found no proper occlusion or obstruction anywhere.
Basically, the impression I'm getting here is that the Asus has better base sound quality than Creative cards, but has buggy drivers and doesn't properly support half of the things it claims to support (such as proper EAX emulation)
I guess EAX is Windows 7 is a mess either way. I tried installing 3DSoundBack for my built-in Realtek card, and it totally broke the audio in Thief (wrong volume levels, clipping, badly working echos). What's the EAX quality in ALchemy like?
Matthew on 28/2/2011 at 14:34
I usually keep EAX off to be honest, as my speakers tend to go a bit funny (the centre one is far too soft and so I can hardly hear any voices from characters standing in front of me - which is all of them).
Nameless Voice on 28/2/2011 at 14:47
Yeah, I hated 5.1 surround sound when I had it, usually ended up setting the speakers to stereo, mainly because of the fact that idiot filmmakers thought it'd be a good idea to put all the sound in only the tiny centre speaker. But that's neither here nor there, EAX is for audio effects like reverb, not positional sound?
