Sound Card poll - who's got a stand alone soundcard?

[jimborae]

I spent out on a good motherboard with decent audio and abandoned my creative cards having used them for years. This was really based on terrible driver support from them for successive versions of Windows (8, 10) and realising that onboard has improved so much as to make them irrelevant.

This. Ditched Creative years ago due to terrible customer support, went with Asus, now use onboard, sound cards pretty much irrelevant these days for most tasks.

[kalniel]

I no longer use an Audio Addon Card (though I probably still have an Asus Xonar ) I use a Micromega DAC which works pretty well when I upsample to 192Khz or a little less with SoX.

What is the benefit of upsampling out of interest?

[Jonj1611]

Interestingly I just removed my Audigy RX as the onboard sound sounded better! I have a Gigabyte AX370 Gaming K5

[Zak33]

It does seem as though the soundcard market has shrunk, from what you guys are saying.

We all now have immense CPU power to back up any overheads required by the onboard chips - my Ryzen 1700 doesnt break a sweat in anything really.

Does anyone have an off board DAC via a set of headphones or similar? ie bypass any requirement for soundcard, and go digital via USB ?

[pp05]

Have been using onoboard sound for last decade.

Partly because of awful driver for previous owned sound cards.

[scaryjim]

Don't think I've bought a discrete sound card in over a decade, but then I'm not particularly an audiophile, and I don't have surround set-ups for anything, so I've really not seen the need.

The last card I bought was the Hercules GameTheatre XP - lovely bit of kit, that came with a breakout box providing a wide range of inputs/outputs, which was great for doing bits of recording and audio work on the side. It also came with hardware support and licensing for Dolby Headphones, which gave amazing positional audio from normal headphones.

Nowadays most of the computers in the house are laptops, and most of the ones that aren't use HDMI with audio coming form the built in speakers in the monitors.

I do have one external audio device nowadays - although I'd hardly call it a "soundcard". It's a Tascam US-1200, a 6-in 2-out 'prosumer' USB audio interface. Lovely bit of kit. I think onboard sound is basically good enough for any standard home use nowadays, and you need to have niche requirements to look at anything else...

EDIT to add:

What is the benefit of upsampling out of interest?

I'd be amazed if there was any. There's constant arguments about sampling rates when initially recording audio (theoretically you can accurately reconstruct any waveform with a sampling rate of twice the peak frequency, so going above ~ 48kHz shouldn't have any real benefit, but...), but upsampling an existing sampled audio to a higher rate can't get you any higher resolution than the original recording holds....?

[kalniel]

It does seem as though the soundcard market has shrunk, from what you guys are saying.

We all now have immense CPU power to back up any overheads required by the onboard chips - my Ryzen 1700 doesnt break a sweat in anything really.

Does anyone have an off board DAC via a set of headphones or similar? ie bypass any requirement for soundcard, and go digital via USB ?

I have off-board DAC, and I pass the sound over optical digital to the DAC on my Marrantz amp. It's not about CPU power but DAC (and downstream amplification) quality.

Edit: ah, sorry, you're specifically asking about USB and DAC built into headphones? Only experience of that was some creative fatality type gaming sets, which were basically no better than a cheap creative card. Pretty poor.

[Zak33]

We've gt a pair of USB Sennheisers here (spot on.. truly spot on) and a pair of utterly astonishing Steel Series Arctis Pro Gamedacs which are even more awesome.. but they are wedge!

[ik9000]

last sound card I owned was bought in 2000 and retired circa 2006. Onboard has been fine ever since.

[peterb]

We've gt a pair of USB Sennheisers here (spot on.. truly spot on) and a pair of utterly astonishing Steel Series Arctis Pro Gamedacs which are even more awesome.. but they are wedge!

But not notch?

[Zak33]

But not notch?

i've got no idea what that means.... explain pls

[Spreadie]

External USB sound here - Asus Xonar U5 so I can switch between speakers and headphones with one touch.

I also have a Creative E3 card/headphone amplifier, but the U5 is my main sound device.

[peterb]

i've got no idea what that means.... explain pls

They are wedge shaped without this year's 'must not have' accessory - a notch - which seems to incite unfathomable depths of rage among some people!

[Zak33]

oh I seeeeeeeeeeee


no

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I haven't bothered with a soundcard for years - even yonks ago Nvidia Soundstorm was awesome. Creative TBH really held back PC audio with all the stuff they pulled.

I do use a DAC for audio stuff to a headphone amp though.

What is the benefit of upsampling out of interest?

Apparently some stuff about improving signal to noise to ratio(apparently) - not sure if it has any real effect TBH.

[OilSheikh]

Who's using onboard, and is happy? - Me, Yes
Who's using onboard and missing their old sound card? - N/A
Who's got a stand alone soundcard and can tell the difference to the onboard sound? - Sound Blaster Audigy 2 from a decade ago sounds better than Realtek tosh
Who's got a stand alone soundcard and is about to take it out because they can't tell the difference? - N/A