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

[Zak33]

hiya lovely people.

I know this should be in the Hardware section but .. hey, Admin priv's and such like

I have just moved from an old PC to a new Ryzen rig (all my own purchases, no HEXUS support)

I HAD a standalone Soundcard.. and now I have onboard.

What I wanna know is :

Who's using onboard, and is happy?
Who's using onboard and missing their old sound card?
Who's got a stand alone soundcard and can tell the difference to the onboard sound?
Who's got a stand alone soundcard and is about to take it out because they can't tell the difference?

and any combo's there-off

[Biscuit]

I, like you, just moved to Ryzen and no longer have a discrete card. I'm missing it, but given that my old system isn't there to directly compare with and I'm offloading the DAC to my amp/wireless headphones, I don't know if it's just in my head.

Tempted to get something USB based, maybe even a professional grade audio interface... Just because...

Seems like a lot of the companies that used to do this stuff have dropped out. Creative still kicking about but they always were a bit pants.

Edit: I might put the card (Asus Xonar D2X) in my office workstation before I retire it. I have a SPDIF switch, so can quickly flick between them and compare.

[Zak33]

drivers are part of the issue... Win 10 drivers for old cards

I don't think Creative are pants ! but I've not tried one recently

[Unique]

i use a mix on various machines. for djing i need to use either a mixer with inbuilt soundcard or use an external card, plus i have a cheap 99p usb soundcard that let's me use a mix of internal and external. this desktop i'm using now has no spif out as it's a server, so i use a cheapish USB external soundcard that has optical out to my amp. i've also got a hdmi graphics card to output audio to the tv as the inbuilt dvi lacks sound (an adapter can convert video to hmdi but the audio is gimped in bios so i have to use the external card). other desktop in the other room i used to use the onboard audio as it had 5.1 out but the last few years use the graphics card with hdmi out to the AV amp, but i've been using media streamers for years and most recently got a nvidia sheild, so i don't output audio directly from desktops much unless i'm playing music. these days i don't notice much difference but in the old days the quality of add on cards was much less hissier than inbuilt, but the days of digital output usually does away with that

i don't do gaming, although i have a bunch of consoles, so i'm just either outputting music or videos, sometimes in 5.1. i use a mix of windows versions plus osx on my macbook

btw i don't use plastic speakers or bluetooth speaker docks etc, all audio output to full size AV amps with either wooden bookshelf speakers or floorstanding speakers. i only use headphones for djing or PMP/phone listening on the go. so i have good audio setups in both rooms, never used plastic speakers with any of my pc setups ever, always plugged into my seperate hifi system amps with a long RCA cable, and even playing a 128k mp3 if that's all that's available, still get's a decent sound from the speakers, but switch to a HD source like SACD or DVDA and you can easily hear the difference. switch to vinyl and you can hear all the pops and clicks and issues that discolour the sound and make me prefer good quality digital and technology over a medium that had it's day in the 70s

[dangel]

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.

[kalniel]

I have a stand alone (asus xonar variety, using third party drivers) and for headphone use I very much notice the difference, largely, but not exclusively, because it has a good amp and can drive decent headphones. However, most of my usage now is through a hifi and therefore I'm just using optical out and bypassing the sound card's DAC so if I weren't occasionally using headphones I would notice no difference. I realise I could also just put the headphones on the hi-fi and then I really would have no use for the stand alone

[Ferral]

I haven't used a dedicated sound card now for around 10 years, last one was a Creative and it wasn't compatible with Windows Vista or 7, not even a basic driver so I started using onboard then. In all fairness onboard sound has come on leaps and bounds over the past few years and you get decent quality sound from them now. Not forgetting a decent set of speakers goes a long way, don't get the cheapo desktop ones that your local shop have, pay a bit extra and get some Creative or the likes or run out to an amp and whatever is hooked up to that.

[spacein_vader]

I haven't used a dedicated sound card now for around 10 years, last one was a Creative and it wasn't compatible with Windows Vista or 7, not even a basic driver so I started using onboard then. In all fairness onboard sound has come on leaps and bounds over the past few years and you get decent quality sound from them now. Not forgetting a decent set of speakers goes a long way, don't get the cheapo desktop ones that your local shop have, pay a bit extra and get some Creative or the likes or run out to an amp and whatever is hooked up to that.

I'm another who bailed out of dedicated sound cards when Creative Labs refused to make drivers for the Live! cards that they were still selling to be compatible with Vista and on. They'd quite happily sell you an audigy based largely on the same components instead.

The final straw was when an enterprising individual managed to hack the drivers into working on Vista anyway so they took legal action to stop him.

Since then it's been onboard digital out into an external amp attached to some hifi speakers. You can get solid single source class d amps (usually aimed at the automotive market,) for less than £50 on Amazon.

[Dashers]

I've got a Creative Soundblaster Z. I moved to it from an Audigy 2 ZS - due to a need to switch from PCI to PCIe. Driver support for the Audigy 2 was poor, but it didn't take much to load the drivers onto a newer OS. Don't think it's compatible with Windows 10 as the audio stack is very different.

The SBZ on 10 has been fine. Drivers work as expected.

I haven't compared it with on-board sound, but I don't have an especially good on-board chip (no need). There are boards out there with the creative chips on board.

Whether it's required or not, I'm not so sure any more. I don't do any professional music, so I don't know about things like funky ASIO and that sort of jazz. My line-in picks up interference when playing games due to SLI and PCIe, I read somewhere that this is an Nvidia issue that has existed for generations and isn't really card specific. No idea if this applies to on-board.

Creative dropped the ball with things like EAX, so game developers have done it differently now, so I don't think there is any hardware advantage to a dedicated card.

What I want from a dedicated sound card is:
- good noise free sound: (check, it does this, but I don't know if on-board doesn't).
- a Dolby/THX encoder to output digital audio: (it does this, but it's laggy AF which makes it pointless as sounds are noticably delayed)
- high-quality granular control over EQ: (partial, it has an EQ, but it's fairly naff)
- digital effects processing (reverb etc): (no, has some silly effects you can put on your voice, but nothing customisable)

There is a good built in headphone amp, which really makes a difference when using analogue headphones directly. In summary, it's good at playing audio back, but whether it's significantly better than on-board, I'm afraid I cannot answer that yet.

I suspect that'll be entirely based on what chip your on-board you have. The high quality ones with dedicated circuitry and swappable op-amps, I can't imagine there is a difference. The bog standard audio codec, I'd avoid like the plague.

[MrJim]

drivers are part of the issue... Win 10 drivers for old cards

I don't think Creative are pants ! but I've not tried one recently

The actual audio hardware Creative produce is pretty good, but they have a terrible history of not providing driver support for older hardware on newer versions of Windows. Consequently I just gave up buying Creative products. And at the same time, integrated audio audio became 'good enough' for my needs. Like Biscuit, I switched to outboard DACs, so the integrated audio is less of an issue.

[Dashers]

Another option of course, is an external sound card. Creative do some of those too. Look interesting, never tried one though.

[neonplanet40]

Recently I purchased a Creative Soundblaster Z from Maplin in the closing down sale. I used to ALWAYS have a discrete card but this went by the wayside when I didn't have the room for one. I always thought I might be missing something in regards to sound quality.

However, from the get-go, the card was a nightmare. It seemed to me that creatives product support was just as bad as it had always been. When I got it working, I didn't notice a clear enough difference in sound which would persuade me to put up with the bugs. I've now upgraded to Ryzen and am using the onboard sound. In my mind, it's fine. Not as good as my Denon X6400 in the other room, but what would I expect? UNless you have some excellent speakers (and I'm talking about real quality speakers like B&W, MA etc) then you won't notice any real difference other than a bit of placebo. My pc has Logitech Z906 speakers and I class them as basic, yet still better than most peoples PC setup.

[outwar6010]

I have a soundblaster zx and its great when it works but the software isn't that great(hasn't been updated by creative in some time too) and has quirks.

[DanceswithUnix]

When I care about audio I will be wearing USB headphones or the Rift which basically is integrated USB headphones.

On board audio goes to some old but actually still rather good Creative 2.1 speakers, but as the main use case is YouTube videos and casual gaming it only matters that it works.

I probably have an old PCI Audigy card at the back of a drawer somewhere, think the Gravis Ultrasound may have been chucked out due to lack of ISA slots on the motherboard

[spacein_vader]

When I care about audio I will be wearing USB headphones or the Rift which basically is integrated USB headphones.

On board audio goes to some old but actually still rather good Creative 2.1 speakers, but as the main use case is YouTube videos and casual gaming it only matters that it works.

I probably have an old PCI Audigy card at the back of a drawer somewhere, think the Gravis Ultrasound may have been chucked out due to lack of ISA slots on the motherboard

I might still have an Adlib ISA card somewhere...

[Millennium]

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.

This seems to work well. I think the power hardware to output line level or headphone or whatever might still be a little weak compared to proper audio hardware. Having said all that, I am still thinking of upgrading!