Thirith on 15/2/2017 at 09:41
Last weekend, after hearing here and there about the benefits of a dedicated sound card compared to onboard sound, I went and got myself my first Soundblaster in, oh, 10+ years, namely a Soundblaster ZX (with a name like that, you kinda expect rubber keys, right?). While I find it difficult to compare sound quality without being able to listen to all the options side by side, my impression is definitely that the sound quality is better and the sound generally more defined, both on my 2.1 speakers and my headphones.
I'm curious: how many of the people here still use sound cards and how many have simply moved on to onboard sound at some point, like I did a couple of builds ago?
voodoo47 on 15/2/2017 at 10:22
not much of a sound guy - and from the Dark point of view, dedicated sound cards seem to be the only hardware part capable of crashing the entire system if things go south, so no reason to look beyond the realtek chip on my motherboard really.
but that reminds me, I need to check what happened to AMD's 3d sound on graphics cards initiative, haven't heard anything in a while..
zoog on 15/2/2017 at 16:48
Not many - 99.(9)% of users are listening to mp3 and styles like rap or house or rnb - it just don't expect any sound quality. Plus equipment like 2.1 noname (mictrolab etc) speakers just aren't made to sound - with marketing you pay first $500 just for the case. Further, integrated sound doesn't hiss and wheeze last 10 years - most people are satisfied with that.
I.e. if you don't know such words as 'sound', 'card' - you dont't need it.
Judith on 15/2/2017 at 17:23
For me creative was always a dodo, even if their sound cards had amazing specs, their audio ports were low quality and noisy. Haven't checked any of their products since X-Fi. I use integrated onboard for everyday stuff, and external USB interface and good headphones for quality listening.
Renzatic on 15/2/2017 at 18:49
Wow. I don't think I've bought a soundcard since I grabbed an AWE64 back in the late 90's. Other than losing that supercool onboard wavetable synthesizer (which made MIDI files actually sound good), I haven't felt like I've missed out on much of anything since going with integrated.
I could see how some people could justify getting one if they produce music, or are just really, really into it. But for me? Eh.
heywood on 16/2/2017 at 00:14
I haven’t used a sound card in my gaming PC for almost 10 years. As soon as I got a motherboard with a SPDIF output, it was gone. I use headphones with a separate headphone amp with built-in DAC. I’m kind of an audio snob, so the headphones I like tend to be harder to drive than your average PC audio jack is made to handle.
Ever since DirectX 10, sound processing has been done in software, so there’s no performance advantage to using a good sound card anymore. If you don’t need higher quality inputs or outputs or more of them, there’s little reason to.
I really miss the Aureal A3D cards from the late 1990s. A3D had real 3D positional audio using a HRTF and it used wave tracing to model sound propagation through the 3D environment. In games that really took advantage of A3D 2.0, an Aureal Vortex 2 card + good headphones made for a really immersive experience. Going from regular old Soundblaster sound to A3D 2.0 was like going from software rendering to a 3dfx card. When it comes to immersion, the environmental modeling was as important as the positioning. With Creative’s EAX, a sound will be put through a canned reverb that might sound like a grenade bouncing in a warehouse, or if they picked the reverb effect just right it might sound like a grenade bouncing in some hallway somewhere. With the environmental modeling in A3D 2.0, it could sound like a grenade bouncing down that corridor with a bend in it right over there.
Unreal Tournament, Unreal (with a later patch), and SS2 were games that I remember really taking big advantage of it. A3D made a big difference in Q3A too, and SiN and Half-Life. Even Thief: TDP sounded better on A3D, even if it didn’t take advantage of the environmental modeling. It’s a shame that on modern hardware, you can’t play those old games in their full glory any longer, so I can’t even show somebody what they missed.
And of course the villain in all this is Creative.
zoog on 16/2/2017 at 04:02
Quote:
motherboard with a SPDIF output
100% of them have low-quality software resampling.. are you using SSRC plugin?
Quote:
so I can't even show somebody what they missed
real gamers own dedicated high-end win98 PC)
Renzatic on 16/2/2017 at 06:24
It's weird to think that all these things that used to require 100+ dollar pieces of dedicated hardware can now be emulated in software with barely any overhead.
Makes you appreciate just how fast our computers have become over these last couple of decades.
heywood on 16/2/2017 at 21:32
The problem is nobody is doing in software what those old A3D cards did in hardware.
You can get 3D positional audio processing in software. The best implementation to my ears is OpenAL, but relatively few games support it, and no recent ones. FMOD can do 3D positional audio, but last I heard it was inferior to OpenAL for this, and probably still is. I haven't checked what's new with FMOD recently, but as of 2 years ago their HRTF was still just a placeholder.
You can't get the same real-time environmental modeling via wave tracing that A3D had, because Creative is holding the patents and isn't licensing them. When Aureal started to take over the high end gaming card market, Creative called their army of lawyers to arms and tied Aureal up in litigation. Ultimately, Aureal prevailed in court, but nearly went bankrupt because of it. Then Creative offered a lucrative buyout to Aureal's owners and management team, who took the money and ran in 2000. Creative then killed the A3D product line and hasn't come out with any product since then which includes the technology. The wave tracing is computationally expensive, so even with today's fast computers I'm not sure a software implementation would be viable.
Creative's next victim was Sensaura, who developed a 3D positional audio technology that was competing with A3D, although without the environmental modeling. Sensaura's algorithms were particularly good with vertical positioning of sound sources. After A3D was taken off the market, all of the PC audio chip makers were licensing their tech. In 2003, Creative bought them out as well, and cut off licensing. Since then Creative has had all of the important 3D audio patents and other IP locked up. The Sensaura algorithms might have been incorporated into CMSS-3D, but I'm not really sure. So you might still be able to get it from Creative if you buy one of their cards, but I doubt you will benefit that much from it in most modern games. Current games are just not developed with 3D audio in mind.
It is sad but true that if you weren't on the 3D audio bandwagon in the late 1990s, you don't know what you missed. A generation of gamers and game developers have come of age with 5.1 and that's not 3D audio.
heywood on 16/2/2017 at 21:50
Quote Posted by zoog
100% of them have low-quality software resampling.. are you using SSRC plugin?
I try to avoid sample rate conversion as much as possible. My mobo is an MSI Z87-G45 Gaming X, with an onboard Realtek ALC1150 which is happy outputting anything up to 24/192. For music I use WASAPI to get "bit perfect" output bypassing the Windows mixer with no SRC or volume control. But most games mix everything at 48 KHz within the sound library (e.g. FMOD) and send it to the Windows mixer. I haven't found a way to get around that.
