MojoKid (1002251) writes
"Back in the day (which is a scientific measurement for anyone who used to walk to school during snowstorms, uphill, both ways), integrated audio solutions had trouble earning respect. Many enthusiasts considered a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It's been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced, a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs, in general. These days, the Sound Blaster ZxR is Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's integrated audio solution. It also features a built-in headphone amplifier, beamforming microphone, a multi-core Sound Core3D audio processor, and various proprietary audio technologies. While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects and it also produces noticeably superior audio in music and movies, provided your speakers can keep up."
Re:No.
By Desler
•
2014-Jul-10 19:20
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
Why do you lump Klipsch in with Monster Cables? The founder of Klipsch is renown for debunking many crap claims made by many speaker makers similar to the nonsense claims that Monster makes. Perhaps you mean "No highs. No lows. It's Bose"? K-horns, for example, have always been solid speakers.
Re:No.
By Anonymous Coward
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2014-Jul-10 19:39
• Score: 5, Funny
• Thread
Of course you can't tell the difference. You need the Monster cables to go with them!
Another no.
By duke_cheetah2003
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2014-Jul-10 21:05
• Score: 3
• Thread
As someone who's been on the audiophile ride from the early days of strange use of the PC speaker, and the first FM synthesis boards, I can say honestly say, a few things happened that made discrete audio hardware obsolete:
1. a basic DSP became widely available, to do audio processing
2. storage became vast enough, combined with audio compression, it made more sense to just pre-record all your audio effects and music and play them back through a basic DSP. I seen this shift in games through the years, from old school methods of creating sound effects and music with code, to just playing audio files included with your game.
3. the general purpose CPU became powerful enough to do any complex signal processing and simply use the basic DSP to output the results of the processing.
Basically, in my opinion, specialize hardware is useless in the face of vast storage and general purpose CPU processing. So a basic DSP is all ya gunna need and that's what basically every PC comes with, standard now.
Stop using both a long time ago too...
By RedMage
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2014-Jul-10 22:13
• Score: 3
• Thread
Integrated audio isn't good enough, isn't great, and isn't for me. I have a pro-level sound studio, and there's no way your going to tell me that the noisy environment that is the system motherboard is going to give me results I can be proud of. Not even for gaming, thanks.
Discreet card? Ok, maybe, but generally you need to jump up to RME or some such before you can really call it good. I have a an RME RayDAT - This means that that all my AD and DA happens somewhere else, and not in the computer. It all goes digital over ADAT to my mixer (a Yamaha DM2000) where the conversion happens. Or it goes digital over ethernet (audinate Dante) to an X32, again where the conversion happens.
There are a ton of good external boxes to handle sound - some quite reasonable. Stay away from the onboard and cheap USB sound dongles. If you have the speakers to handle it, then why put up with bad sound?
depends
By O('_')O_Bush
•
2014-Jul-10 23:12
• Score: 3
• Thread
Quality wise, I think there are minor gains. The biggest gains come from being able to drive nice/high quality headphones at the correct power levels so they sound as they should. Some motherboards can't supply enough power and the headphones sound... gross... because of it.
Also, you can gain a few FPS in some games by offloading the audio magic onto a card rather than do it on the CPU.