Sound cards?

[whiteman]

I know jack about these things or anything about sound from computers to cars. with the new sound update thought i might want to take advantage of it, mine now has just the on board 7.1 what ever. Would i hear any difference by upgrading? Card suggestions would be great if it worth it and i have plenty of speed and power to run what ever so all cards are open for suggestion. Thanks

[gyrene81]

Question, are you going to be running 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound speakers with a self powered sub-woofer of 100+ watts with satellite speakers using carbon fiber cones and titanium domed tweeters?



If all you're using is headphones or standard computer speakers...stick with the Realtek 7.1 sound chip, you will never hear the difference.

[Bino]

Question, are you going to be running 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound speakers with a self powered sub-woofer of 100+ watts with satellite speakers using carbon fiber cones and titanium domed tweeters?

If all you're using is headphones or standard computer speakers...stick with the Realtek 7.1 sound chip, you will never hear the difference.

Gyrene, I'll bet you're right about sound *quality* on 99.9% of all PC speaker systems.

But an onboard sound chip uses the main system CPU for some functions, right?  Doesn't that impose some sort of performance penalty when compared to a "real" sound card?

[Ghastly]

Whiteman, the first question is "What do you use now for sound output?" If you are using a standard relatively low cost headphones, or standard computer speakers with a left and a right (maybe even 2.1, with a subwoofer) a new card is not likely to sound much different than what you have now.

On the other hand, switching from something like standard stereo headphones to the Turtle Beach HPA2 5.1 headphones is going be like night and day, and same goes for a 5.1 speaker system, assuming you have the room and take the time to set up the satellite speakers in the right places.

The main reason for changing your sound card (from an AH perspective) would be the fact that inexpensive onboard sound controllers don't have signal processors, and force the CPU to do the dirty work.   If you have plenty of CPU horsepower, you might not experience a problem, but then again ....

<S>

[BoilerDown]

That may be true, but isn't the only reason to use a sound card.  On-board audio usually uses a noticeable amount of CPU resources, making the computer slower at running other tasks.  

And on-board audio is usually horrible enough that you'll hear a difference even with crappy speakers or headphones... it tends to pick up "noise" from capacitors on the motherboard, hard drive motors... sometimes you'll recognize when "you've got mail" without the annoying AOL soundfile.  A sound card is more insulated from computer noise.  Note that some on-board audio is better than others (I loved my NForce2 MB way back in the day), so you might be ok, but I wouldn't count on it.

[gyrene81]

If all you have is a single core processor, then cpu utilization from an onboard sound chip is or used to be fairly significant depending on what you were doing...my dual core 2.4Ghz on Windows 7 64bit, using my Realtek 7.1 onboard chip listening to mp3's through Windblows Media Player, uses less resources than any MP3 player on my old P4 system that uses a Soundblaster X-fi.

Keep your drivers up to date, run your system lean. Unless you're doing some heavy sound editing or wanting to entertain the neighbors with your music collection, buying a high end sound card is wasting money.

[715]

Does the new Miles Sound system use the processing capabilities of sound boards or does it just treat them like dumb A/Ds like onboard sound chips?

[whiteman]

sounds like sticking with what i have for now is best, thanks for the input.

[Chalenge]

By adding a "real" sound card you would take a load off of your system. While onboard audio is not as burdensome as USB or in some cases "real sound cards" it does add a small amount of cpu load. Using a PCI slot with an audio card (one that actually has an audio processor on it) is by far better. Watch out though because there are an awful lot of audio cards that do not. Creative has a big name in the audio world and so they have no problem pumping up the price on cards that suck cpu time (or advertising a 16 bit card as 24 bit) and that load all sorts of latency adding utilities on your computer. Unfortunately for us there is no happy medium of a true hi-fidelity card that also has all the game enhancements we need for AH. So the best you can ask for is a card that has game enhancements and does not load the CPU down.

With all that in mind I selected the HT Omega Striker 7.1 because its less than $100 and offers just what AH needs.

If you use a Striker with onboard audio you can run speakers for environment and effects and onboard audio for Vox.

[BaldEagl]

Whiteman, the first question is "What do you use now for sound output?" If you are using a standard relatively low cost headphones, or standard computer speakers with a left and a right (maybe even 2.1, with a subwoofer) a new card is not likely to sound much different than what you have now.

On the other hand, switching from something like standard stereo headphones to the Turtle Beach HPA2 5.1 headphones is going be like night and day, and same goes for a 5.1 speaker system, assuming you have the room and take the time to set up the satellite speakers in the right places.

My Klipsch 2.1's sound awsome.  Much better than most 5.1 or 7.1 systems.  Just saying.

[Pudgie]

My Klipsch 2.1's sound awsome.  Much better than most 5.1 or 7.1 systems.  Just saying.

+1 as I have the exact same setup as you BE.