Sound Cards

[Scotch 1]

New to the computer world, I was looking to install a sound card. I have a few in mind...                                                                                 Creative PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card/Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD Sound Card/ASUS Xonar D2 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Ultra Fidelity Sound Card with Complete Dolby/DTS Sound Technologies/ASUS 90-YAA0E0-0UAN00Z 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Xonar Essence Sound Card/ASUS Xonar Essence STX Virtual 7.1 Channels PCI Express x1 Interface 124 dB SNR / Headphone AMP Card/ASUS Xonar Essence ST PCI Interface Audio Card/ASUS Xonar D2X 7.1 Channels PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card....Any feed back would be great..

[Bino]

First off, you need to take pity on us Olde Fartes with weak eyes, and format your text, just a little.  Please. 

As near as I can puzzle out, this is what you listed...

• Creative PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD Sound Card
• ASUS Xonar D2 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Ultra Fidelity Sound Card with Complete DolbyDTS Sound Technologies
• ASUS 90-YAA0E0-0UAN00Z 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Xonar Essence Sound Card
• ASUS Xonar Essence STX Virtual 7.1 Channels PCI Express x1 Interface 124 dB SNR Headphone AMP Card
• ASUS Xonar Essence ST PCI Interface Audio Card/ASUS Xonar D2X 7.1 Channels PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card

As for the cards, you do not want anything that uses the main CPU of the machine for digital signal processing.  You want an independent processor working on sounds.  Avoid, if you can, the Creative Labs bloatware.  Install only the minimum driver.  YMMV

[MonkGF]

If you are going to get a soundcard, the Xonar's are some of the better ones out there. The ONLY reason for an add-on soundcard like this is sound quality. In my case I bought some Sennheisser headphones, and they can really use the headphone amp on the Xonars, so I got a Xonar. If you are happy with the sound you are getting from the motherboard, don't buy a soundcard.

Note that sound processing takes very little CPU these days, so buying a soundcard rarely leads to much of a performance increase. This is strictly an audio quality issue. Even with the Xonar, I've disabled the Game setup they've got that tries to hook D3D calls, that seemed to cause instability for me.

[Silat]

The Xonar is excellent:)

[Ghastly]

Note that sound processing takes very little CPU these days, so buying a soundcard rarely leads to much of a performance increase

Got Proof?  

(Note, the context of this forum is AH, so I'm referring to specifically during game play.)

<S>

[Chalenge]

The Xonar could be a really nice card but the ones I have tested have been trashy with noise. I literally tried every card there is on the market (and Im not kidding) before settling on the Fatality Champion. However I have to tell you that even the Fatality Champion has weaknesses. Its strengths are its extremely low CPU load and 3D positional locations which are very important for first person shooters but absolutely a must if you GV in AH. When it comes to 3D positional sound nothing beats the Fatality Champion. Its weakness is vox. You can do very well with vox by getting a really good headset like the Heil Proset Media Pro but you will discover that the Fatality Champion is picky about mic settings. Fortunately the FP hookup includes an input adjustment.

The best I have found for vox input with the cleanest signal and lowest latency is the Phonic Firefly 302 Plus Firewire interface. Of course to use that you need a mic that is something like studio quality (broadcast type) with phantom power of +48V. The plus side is that the 192 kHz firewire interface will input a pure (clean) voice line directly into Windows without the need for another sound card and that will allow you to do external processing if you like vocoder effects and so on. This means zero (0) cpu load also and your sound card will be relaying the game audio only.

As far as CPU load is concerned it doesnt matter how fast the cpu is. The problem occurs when the load changes under gaming conditions and the cpu is forced to allocate processing power when it is already fully loaded (not that I fully understand the problem but thats it in a nutshell). When things start getting shuffled around is when you get stutters and freeze ups and this can lead to system crashes BSOD and all manner of craziness.

In other words I disagree with Monk.

[MonkGF]

As far as CPU load is concerned it doesnt matter how fast the cpu is. The problem occurs when the load changes under gaming conditions and the cpu is forced to allocate processing power when it is already fully loaded (not that I fully understand the problem but thats it in a nutshell). When things start getting shuffled around is when you get stutters and freeze ups and this can lead to system crashes BSOD and all manner of craziness.

In other words I disagree with Monk.

That's a sign of an overloaded system, and can happen with plenty of things besides audio.

The fundamental problem with audio on a PC is drivers. NO ONE can write a decent audio driver to save their lives. That's one big reason Microsoft went all-software with Vista, and even then audio drivers that just need to take the processed audio buffers and spit them out are still regularly unstable. It's amazing how bad these things are. And the 3D audio drivers are among the worst. As I mentioned above, I turned off that part of the Xonar due to instability issues.

Part of what you're describing above is often caused by bus contention, and it can be WORSE when the card does 3D positional audio because far more data has to be sent between main memory and the card, and if your video card is also getting hammered on textures and the disk drive is going you get stutters and pauses and whatnot. That was a famous issue back in the early NVidia and SBLive days, typically less of a problem now but can still happen with underpowered systems, or if you are pushing memory limits on your game, or other related factors.

So basically sound is a mess on the PC and will be until someone figures out how to write a stable audio driver.

[Scotch 1]

Ugh, so confused, I just want a great sound,wheather its from headphones and or desktop speakers.I see so many card out there....

[Ghastly]

Scotch, for what it's worth I have 25 years in the tech industry - and Chalenge strikes me as knowing what he's talking about.  If I were the one asking I'd take his recommendation - just DON'T install anything beyond the drivers.  All the other Creative crapware is highly intrusive, and impossible to reverse without a wipe/reinstall.  (So are the drivers, actually... but you kind of need those.)

And while you are at it, invest in a pair of TurtleBeach HPA2 headphones - you won't regret it. 

<S>

[Scotch 1]

Thank You all for your advise.....

[715]

I have a question if I may.  Before Vista the sound processing was done (partially) on the sound card.  Didn't Vista (and Win7) take control of the audio processing (for copyright protection reasons)?  In other words, under Vista or Win7 does a sound card do anything beyond A/D and D/A?  Also, does the Miles Sound System AH now uses make use of any processing capabilities of the sound card?  (The reason I ask is I've been using Realtek motherboard sound and never bothered to install the Creative Xi-Fi Extreme Gamer card I bought because of previous bad experiences with software installation and I wasn't sure it would do any good.)

[MonkGF]

I have a question if I may.  Before Vista the sound processing was done (partially) on the sound card.  Didn't Vista (and Win7) take control of the audio processing (for copyright protection reasons)?  In other words, under Vista or Win7 does a sound card do anything beyond A/D and D/A?  Also, does the Miles Sound System AH now uses make use of any processing capabilities of the sound card?  (The reason I ask is I've been using Realtek motherboard sound and never bothered to install the Creative Xi-Fi Extreme Gamer card I bought because of previous bad experiences with software installation and I wasn't sure it would do any good.)

I can't talk about Miles, I'm not that up on what they do.

Vista/Win7 do all mixing of audio, including 3D and other effects, in software on your CPU. Creative, Asus, and others have hacked around this with special DLLs that hook DirectSound to patch in before the mixing and move this stuff back to their cards. This works, but can cause stability issues, as I ran into with my Asus Xonar.

There is also OpenAL, a separate audio library that can talk directly to the cards and let them do hardware 3D and effects as well. Some games can use this API for hardware audio, and be more stable than the DirectSound hacks.

I've found my Xonar to sound better than the onboard audio due to higher quality electronics for converting the digital sound into analog, and because it has a built-in amp for headphones which I use most of the time. I have not had any audio-related performance issues running a Core i7 system, the audio just never blips the CPU meter.

[Chalenge]

That's a sign of an overloaded system, and can happen with plenty of things besides audio.

Negative thats what happens when a sound chip relies upon the cpu for processing power. There are complete card solutions that also rely upon the cpu and lag issues will develop in AH because of it. If you havent experienced this its only a matter of time until you do UNLESS you already have an adequate sound card.

[Skuzzy]

MonkGF, DirectSound does not exist in Vista, nor Windows 7.  It was replaced with stub function calls to the Windows Sound API, or empty function calls where nothing matched in Windows.

The DLL's supplied for these high end sound cards is an attempt to get around the Windows Sound API, by making use of ASIO support, which was also pulled from Vista and Windows 7.  ASUS and Creative, both, have recreated the ASIO driver support, but it is quite flaky and interferes with the Windows Sound API.

Sound engineers have been left with two choices.  Stick with Windows XP, or move to Apple hardware.


The hardware of the sound card is still being used as it is up to the driver (supplied by the manufacturer) to actually play sounds and manage the buffers in the devices.

[Scotch 1]

So i think what im hearing is, stay with the on board sound,and go with a great pair of headphones...?