Ok fellahs, I have pretty good on-board (REALTEK) Audio on the muthaboard, but I'm thinking of getting a Soundblaster Xi-Fi or whatnot.

Three Questions:

1) I use Logitech G35 headphones via a USB port. Since I wouldn't be hooking these up directly to the Soundcards direct audio out, could I still use the soundcard? (i.e. with the on-board audio turned off in BIOS, but via the USB port).

2) Is it worth it? Does the audio improve significantly?

3) If yes to 1&2 above, what card would you recommend?

Always get the best advice here, so thanks in advance.

d.

Sound card takes pressure away from cpu by processing its own stuff.

The main advantage is if you plug it into a full 5:1 or 7:1 speaker set up.

Must admit mine isn't. It's just into line in on my Sony hi-fi but the sound is strong and beefy.

One of the other advantages is a menu has a 'record what you hear' feature which is good for recording music from high quality streams etc

Onboard sound has come a long way and multi-core cpu means it's not so important to have a dedicated sound card but I prefer it and the 'record what you hear' feature is worth it on its own for me plus you have all the additional sound controls in the menus.

Many onboard sound solutions lack in number of voices it can process. My Audigy 2 ZS can do 64 voices while my onboard Realtek ALC888 still can only do 32...

I did a Poll a little while back on soundcard vs onboard here


http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3376490/Poll_Onboard_sound_or_Soundcar.html#Post3376490

I think that default sound devices are sufficiently good enough to say that if you want better sound... get better speakers.

Yep, I'm with Gopher....I used to have a top of the range X-Fi Elite Pro, with my recent motherboard upgrade I thought I'd give the onboard sound a try before re-installing the X-Fi and you can't tell tell the difference whatsoever. The resources taken up these days by onboard sound is minimal and like he says, the real difference is going to be in the speakers or the headset that you use anyway.

The mistake here is calling X-Fi cards an improvement over on board audio. Xonar cards from Asus however, are miles ahead of anything onboard.




1) No. Your G35 has its own sound card. There is no way of improving on that.

2) Yes, if you pair it with proper equipment and covert to FLAC instead of MP3. And better cards - better sound positioning.

3) Something from Asus, albeit you would need a new headphones for that.*


*Guide to gaming headphones / headsets:

http://www.overclock.net/sound-cards-com...s-headsets.html



Or you could go with S/PDIF + reciever with a good DAC => analog headphones.

Agreed. I can definitely tell the difference between my Xonar DX and the onboard sound.

I think the X-FI cards with their onboard RAM (the gamer ones) are the fastest around. I have no experience with the ASUS ones. Only a few guys use them and i don't even know if the drivers run flawlessly with all the games.
But if they sound so good (which i doubt) why aren't they the common cards around?

Creative are the name that everyone knows as they have history on their side.. I remember buying a SB AWE32 soundcard many, many years ago.. The brand name is what gives them market domination.

Brand knowledge does not always equal product superiority though. If you read any group tests for sound cards it quickly becomes clear that in many (presumably) unbiased reviewers opinions in the "gaming soundcard" arena Asus currently hold sway in terms of product quality and driver stability.

Don't take these guys words for it, do a bit of research. I have and my answer would also be go Asus.

Just my tenpenneth worth.

X-Fi is just that. A Name. Nothing more. Google any audio related forums and people who tried Asus will never go back to X-Fi.

What is especially true is driver stability. I will never install any thing from Creative ever again.

Really? Good to know! Never thought about the ASUS card. The drivers itself are not what counts for me. My drivers are just fine and never had any problems with them. But what counts is the sound quality. Does the ASUS one really sound better ingame than the X-FI?

Well... Most people (me included) bought Asus Xonar cards for music playback. But they work great in games, no question about that.

The positioning is there, and I even got EAX or hardware acceleration detected in games like America's Army 3.1 and Red Orchestra 2. I can not comment on other models because my Essence is the flagship of the series focused on music and stereo playback. In reality that is all that you need, but there are other Xonar models more focused on the gaming part.

And there is Auzentech, which transforms X-Fi products in what they should have been from the beginning.

I used to have "surround sound" and 12 inch woofers for my computer. I used a sound card -- that I ran though a separate surround sound amplifier. The sound was awesome. The aircraft engines and guns vibrated my chair.

But, I don't do it anymore -- just a couple of cheap stereo speakers or headphones. My ears are not "golden" enough to hear the difference -- except for volume.

I used to build my own hi-fi speakers and audio systems. Audio is mostly about the speakers once one has sufficient signal quality -- always has been about the speakers on hi-fi setups (orignally, computers were very lo-fi). Given the specifications of recent hi-fi on-motherboard sound (which is what I use), on-board sound should do the job. What's needed is a great multi-channel amplifier and quality speakers (expensive). If the sound card delivers the amplification, then it may be worth it for that reason -- combined with excellent speakers (e.g. 10 or 12 inch subwoofer and 4 to 6 inch side/rear speakers with tweeters -- or more -- I used two 12" woofers and 8" side/rear speakers with tweeters).

Just my biases

Several misconceptions above in several posts. From an electrical engineering and processing standpoint, the X-fi's E-MU 20K1 and 20K2 processors (130 nm die running at 400 MHz with 10000 MIPS) are much more powerful than the C-Media CMI8788 series (ASUS has renamed these the AV100, AV200, etc...) APUs used by ASUS cards. ASUS tried to license the X-Fi chip in 2004/2005 but Creative didnt want that large a direct competitor using their same chip and ASUS balked at the price Creative was asking for the intellectual property license, so ASUS went to C-Media. They fancied up the C-media chip by including Burr Brown and Cirrus Logic bits that made the audio fidelity slightly better than the X-Fi (when used for pure audio performance and when restricted to 2.1 channels or less without complex fourier Z calculations) and they had the good luck of writing the drivers after Microsoft's Vista had already adopted its new audio architecture which removed the drivers from the kernel. Creative, whose X-Fi came out right at the interchange between XP and Vista could not afford to totally rewrite all of its drivers from scratch and therefore, its audio stack is predominately Windows XP ported over. That is why in the first two years of Vista and the start of Windows 7, ASUS really did have the better sound, especially when listening to music, CDs, recordings, etc. The audio path was simplier and drivers DID work better. In games not built for EAX, the two different companies were about equal. For games built on EAX, Creative cards still won out. Creative partially addressed these issues with its release of Alchemy which intercepted hardware audio Direct X calls and passed them to the X-Fi, but this was only a bandage. To answer the complaints and the changing market away from surround setups to headphones, Creative released the X-Fi Titanium HD which does have high quality bits correctly mated to the power of the E-Mu chips and can render complex 3D audio sound stages in 7.1 with much higher location fidelity (including sine (theta) and reverb) than the ASUS cards with GX2.0 or 2.5. It can also play back mono or 2.1 music as faithfully as any ASUS card. By a very slight margin if you want to listen to Nina Simone on 2.0, get a high end ASUS or the X-Fi Titanium HD. If you want to hear 7.1 EAX reproduction from BIOSHOCK in all its glory, get a X-Fi Titanium or HD version and hook it up to 5.1 or 7.1. The latest Titanium HD version basically matches anything from ASUS in terms of audio reproduction, but beats it soundly when it comes surround localization and precision 3D sound imaging.

S! - WD

(yes, I am an EE ... no I dont work for Creative or ASUS or care who wins the audio wars)

Thanks for the infos! What i like about my X-FI card is the whole menu and that i have a "christalizer" and stuff like that and even a dedicated gaming mode.
About Auzentech. I have found these cards but never heard of them. What exactly do they change on these X-FI cards? Are they customized like bikes? Do they also write new drivers for them?

Better components, upgradeable OPAMP, if you feel the sound quality lacking. Various Burr-Brown options available. Drivers are much the same as Creative's drivers, with some Auzentech sauce. It means their drivers come shortly after Creative's release.

Prelude 7.1 owner.

Auzentech licenses both Creative X-fi designs and C-Medi CMI87XX architectures. The cards they make based on the X-fi, include the Prelude 7.1 (which is PCI and not PCI express, although for an audio card this means jack), the Forte (a half-height card perfect for small boxes and HTPC enclosures), the Bravura 7.1 and the daddy Kingpin, the X-fi Home Theater HD (which is mainly meant for piping Dolby HD Audio and DTS Master Audio codecs from Blue Rays to an attached home theater receiver, and which is fully HDCP compliant). These are all similar to the older Creative X-fi Xtreme Music except that they include upgraded DACs, switchable op-amps, cleaner circuit board design, etc... They are basically the X-fi design done hardware right. And the drivers, you ask ? Well the Korean team that writes Auzentech drivers can code fine, but because they reuse the Creative drivers with changes for their redesigned circuitry and because the Direct X audio code base is defined in English terms, they suffer their driver glitches as well. The X-fi Bravura and Prelude are very similar to the latest Creative X-fi Titanium HD card which upgraded several components in order to match its Auzentech competition.

I would note though, that blind testing done in the past in audio labs between various cards, shows that only about 1 person in 128 people can tell the difference between the ASUS Essence for example and the X-fi Titanium Fatalty Pro, when listening to audio tracks. The difference is very, very small unless you move to the 5.1 or larger audio sound stage with surround gaming. And not many people have 5.1 or 7.1 speakers attached to their computer for true (non-software) surround sound. Then the X-fi Emu processor clearly pulls ahead.

Funny how people write off a whole product because they read something on a forum.

I have never had a problem with my card. Plenty of features, rock solid satability and punchy clear sound. No regrets here and no intention to change.

Thank you for writing this sum up. This is basically the info I obtained a year or two before purchasing my Essence STX. IIRC Titanium HD wasn't released back then.

Please correct me here if I am wrong (since you are an EE) but I would again choose Essence over the Titanium. Just because it has a separate molex to avoid getting distortion when powering through MBO alone like you would if running with a high end GPU like GTX 580 (I know few people with Nvidia cards and other Xonar/X-Fi sound cards that claim to have this problem).

Then there is like you said, the question of stereo vs. 5.1/7.1 output. Few people have those kind of multi channel speakers, while many more have a multi channel headphones/headsets. And from an audiophile's viewpoint - stereo headphones will always beat multichannel headset when it comes down to sound quality. Having owned many multi channel headsets in the past, I can vouch for this to be true. Sven sound positioning that is perhaps the only benefit from such headsets is almost as good on a stereo headphones - i.e. the effects can be reproduced. Binaural recording anyone?

As for the "audio wars", I couldn't care much who wins or is winning - just who has a better product. Titanium HD for a change, is a welcome addition from X-Fi.

With my past experience and X-Fi cards, I had lots of problems with their drivers - from restarts to inability to install certain fonts when CL drivers were installed. Irritating to say the least. And then there is that fiasco with a guy from CL who wrote proper drivers for lower sound card models only to loose his job. And the fact that you need to get a higher end model from CL because mid to low end cards have the same chip and sound equally as good.

No thank you. I've had it with CL crappy drivers and work policy.

There will always be people who have problems, be that driver or hardware related with either Asus, X-Fi or Auzentech products. I've had my share of problems with X-Fi.

Yesterday i have read that the ASUS cards are recommended as a replacement for the mid range segment. As well as the Auzentech ones. Beside that, they seem to use the C-Media processors as well.
I have been using my X-FI for almost 2 years now without any problems. I hope i can still say that after i have switched to Win7 next month. A friend of mine had troubles in Vista. The driver wouldn't keep his 5.1 setup and he randomly lost his center box or woofer.

Yes, C-Media processors. Just as WhistlinggDeath said in his post.

I've had the same problems in Win7 with my Xtreme Music. Just as certain problems I had in XP disappeared, new ones appeared in Win7.

TBH, all these sound cards are at best high mid range. For a high end you will need to cash out a lot more and get some kind of DAC that is outside your computer case (e.g. connected via USB). That or use a S/PDIF with a good receiver.

T}{OR, after reading some of your other posts in this thread, I get the indication that you like quality audio......however you then state in the post above you had an 'Xtreme Music' card and you have also mentioned about how you don't rate the X-Fi cards. I was wondering if you were aware that the Xtreme Music soundcard isn't actually an X-Fi card at all - it's a rebadged Audigy 2.

My own personal experience (with the X-Fi Elite Pro used on Vista and Win7) is that the sound quality is brilliant for music and games (especially those that supported EAX5 such as Battlefield 2 with the 'Ultra' settings) but the drivers were nothing but trouble and often caused BSOD's and problems with conflicting hardware such as TV cards. As I mentioned previously, I'm now using onboard 'HD' sound (7.1) with the speakers I used when I had the X-FI Elite Pro and can't really tell the difference....certainly not enough to warrant putting the card back in my base unit and having the worry and endless troubleshooting that goes with the driver and software package.

I was under the impression that Xtreme Music was the only "Xtreme" model with a proper X-Fi chip and others like Audio and Gamer were rebranded Audigy cards? That is what I have read or been told, but you might be right that they are all the same card. As mentioned above, Titanium HD wasn't available when I was upgrading from Xtreme Music. And when I was upgrading, I also upgraded my sound equipment - headphones, speakers, amp and the whole lot to go along with mighty Essence.

I say that they're very much worth it. Why?

-The Realtek ALC889A's analog outputs on my GA-P35-DS3P are prone to buzz whenever I move the mouse or have disk activity going, among other things. It's irritatingly obvious with competent headphones.
-I still play lots of older games that use EAX. Might as well hear them as the developers intended, and ALchemy works well enough.
-Most importantly, CMSS-3D Headphone borders on being an aural wallhack, especially in games that use DirectSound3D or OpenAL (which describe sound with proper 3D coordinates) as opposed to XAudio2 or FMOD (which pre-mix sound into 7.1 at most and stereo at worst before it hits the sound driver, meaning you get height-less 2D sound at best and one-dimensional left-to-right sound at worst), and all it needs is a competent pair of stereo headphones.

Keep in mind that I'm not using the cheaper Creative X-Fi cards, but the Auzentech-built ones (Forte and Prelude, specifically), which also have much less finicky drivers right now. The Titanium HD's said to be just as competent, if not moreso, but I haven't had the chance to test one myself. In addition to that, I exclusively use headphones on my desktop with no loudspeakers whatsoever, and the headphones in question happen to be a Stax Lambda. (In other words, electrostatic audiophile headphones that don't come cheap very often, and by "cheap", I mean "$250-300 for the headphones and a transformer box that still needs to be fed with a speaker amp".)

And to correct an above misconception, the XtremeMusic is a genuine X-Fi; it has the EMU20k1 DSP. The XtremeAudio, on the other hand...basically a rebadged Audigy SE and must be avoided. Still, those Creative cards aren't exactly known for astounding sound quality, especially not with the Auzentech and Asus offerings around (and, for that matter, Creative's own Titanium HD). This is before I get into the ridiculously expensive audiophile DACs with no gaming features whatsoever...

Anyway, one approach I am potentially considering is strictly using an X-Fi card as a DSP for the gaming features while it streams stereo PCM over S/PDIF to a dedicated audio DAC. This way, I don't have to lose out on said gaming features and could even go with a cheaper card that still has S/PDIF output, for the DAC is what will decide the actual audio quality in the end.

Thanks for confirming this. Yeah, it sounds very poor compared to Asus offerings in music playback (still a lot better than onboard audio) but it was reasonably good in games though.

I will try to address all the questions that Thor and others have below quickly, since the Walking Dead Season 2 is about to hit tonight and it is my job to make the popcorn and get the drinks:

1 - A dedicated molex power connector for a sound card is not needed since most APUs only draw 10 to 40 watts at max. The PCI express slot is set by standard at 75 watts max power, and any card that surpasses this is doing so with extra blingy lights or powered amps. Anything about cleaner sound or cleaner power is pure marketing BS (since your power supply powers the motherboard as well). The nominal real reason behind this is induced current changes in the sound card caused by the magnetic field resulting from power flow across the PCI or PCI express slot (from the motherboard), but in any modern motherboard (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, etc...) this is effect is essentially zero.

2 - In the ole days (say pre 2005) onboard sound and some discrete sound cards got a bad wrap for distortion. There were two primary reasons for this; 1 - for onboard sound being output by analogue (thru ADCs), Faraday's and Ampere's Laws, which basically say that a magnetic field (from the motherboard) can induce current (in the analogue out circuitry of onboard sound) causing distortion (or hiss) to the analogue sine waves being sent to the speakers, (Amperes Law says the reverse, a changing electric field induces a corresponding magnetic field change) 2 - Creative cards machine code (drivers) written for Windows XP but being ported over to Windows Vista which changed the audio stack, without Creative failing to take note of how the PCI lanes are effected (notice I did not say PCI express). That is why so many Audigy 2 ZS, Audigy blah blah and X-fi Xtreme Music owners have reported so many problems.

3 - Creative always had a bungled driver writing team that parsed things for marketing needs. Some cards offered Dolby Digital and DTS processing for example and this had to be added an extension to existing drivers, etc... ASUS never went that path when they got into the audio business in 2005, they wrote code for one and only one architecture in C++, making things vastly simpler.

4 - A simpler chip requires simpler drivers. I dont work for Creative or care what their chip can or cannot do, but it is more powerful than any C-Media offering and writing a correct driver for it is likely harder than the simple C-Media audio path.

5 - With the release of the Titanium series of cards, which forced Creative to correctly adopt the PCI-express architecture, and rewrite their drivers, most of the problems disappeared. Those reporting problems are almost always using the older PCI cards (like the Xtreme Music) with Vista or Windows 7. Those using the pci-express built Titanium cards with Vista or Windows 7 rarely report problems.

6 - Which is the most powerful card ? That is likely a tie between the Creative Titanium HD and the Auzentech Home Theater HD, which both leverage the E-Mu processors with nice DACS, op-amps, etc... Which card sounds the best for music listening ? It is a toss up between any of the latest offerings, with maybe a very, very slight edge going to the 124 dB ASUS cards. Which card is the best for 3D sound positioning... easy... its the Creative Titanium or Auzentech X-fi based cards.

7 - How many people can tell the difference between a 118 db rated digital product and a 124 db rated one ? About one in 1 in 764 people. As you can see, that is not likely you, which means the rest is all marketing BS to get you to part with your 200 dollars.

Truth!

Once again, thanks for sharing your expertize with us WhistlinggDeath.



Yes, Essence does use powered amps, in particular - dedicated headphone amp stands out. I've paired my Essence with HD 595 from Sennheiser for audio output and Zalman's ZM-MIC1 clip on microphone for input.