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About LinkBacksLOL Sucks to be Intel lately! They seem to be losing their shit to itsy bitsy AMD. Seems their justifications for those obscene prices is being severely eroded.
LOL Sucks to be Intel lately! They seem to be losing their shit to itsy bitsy AMD. Seems their justifications for those obscene prices is being severely eroded.
/Cheers Cyberguy
Yep, I have a B350 from Asrock and the audio is spot on.Originally Posted by afiretruck
They do exist. At least there are B350 boards with a PCI slot or 2 in the mix. My friend had the exact same need when he bought his Ryzen 2 years ago. However, you may struggle to find an X570 board with one.
Though I strongly suspect, unless you specifically require the unique features of your sound card, you'll find the motherboard's onboard audio to be more than acceptable.
Unfortunately I do need certain hardware specific features of the sound card. To be honest, the driver set is so limited now due to creative's lack of support that I may be forced purely for software reasons to get a new one. And a new card with the features I require is about £300 now. I've also tested on board audio to see if it meets my needs for this precise reason and it just doesn't. My current mobo has got supposedly high end, EM shielded sound with srubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishy filtering caps and all that lot. I suspect if that doesn't cut the proverbial yellow stuff then I'll struggle with any on board solution.
I did find a couple of older Ryzen boards with PCI slots but as you say, I suspect I'll struggle to find a high end overclocker friendly board that has support for the new fangled Ryzen chips and my old tech. My current card is going from £70-£450 on ebay at the moment, which is quite amusing. My concern is that if I do spend silly on a new one, I'll end up with the same software issues as Windows 10 changes and Creative (or others) don't change with them.
Would something like this do the trick for you if you were to get a high-end motherboard without PCI?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-co.../dp/B0024CV3SA
Which card is it? I have a few old-ish Creative devices myself and so far they've kept up with Windows 10.
For high(er) end audio needs, a lot of folks have migrated to USB-DAC systems, eg. those sold by FocusRite (there are better ones, too, but they're not on the tip of my tongue). I'd worry about latency with USB devices like this, but the guys using them are serious/pro users, so it may be the way to go. This kind of device is fairly immune to motherboard changes, and moving the DAC physically outside of the PC isn't a bad plan anyway EM-wise.
Is it not just a case of getting used to the new sound? Some sound cards can colour the sound slightly depending on components used, and you can hear a difference when moving to another but it's not necessarily because one is any lower quality than the other. I've not really paid all that much attention to it lately in all honestly but it's just a thought. It's why some people won't move away from valve-based amplifiers - they objectively 'colour' the sound more than a modern semiconductor amp but some people simply prefer the 'warmness' of the sound. Having said that, it could be recreated to an extent with EQ...
Same with 'wearing-in' some types of headphones - it's often more a case of people simply getting used to them given there have been experiments done comparing before/after breaking them in and there's really no difference in many cases (with the odd exception but whether it's really perceptible is open to debate, I don't recall if they included double-blind trials). It's normal for new headphones/amps/etc to sound a bit weird when you first use them.
I just find it odd that motherboard manufacturers wouldn't put at least some effort into a decent onboard sound solution nowadays, especially for the more expensive boards. Then again I would have thought paying many pounds for a sound card would have meant working drivers, but that's often not the case either!
In theory a USB-DAC would be a good alternative, I also found my PCI sound card to be a bit of a compatibility pain (because PCI) hence why I got rid, but the new onboard is fine and I use USB for headphones/set myself anyway.
WRT latency, I wouldn't imagine that USB would be much different to PCI? I can't think of a modern platform where it's natively supported anyway, it will be via a third-party PCIe-PCI bridge chip on the motherboard.
It's an X-Fi Elite Pro. And yeh I think an adaptor is the way I'm going to have to go. So far Windows 10 has broken the remote controls on the breakout box which is very frustrating but I can still alter the compression and so on using software.
As for the external stuff, I was strongly considering this as I think sometimes the common mode rejection on the card just doesn't get it right and you get EMI until you reset it. Once the relays (or whatever they are) have finished clickity clacking, it goes away. The problem is I've paid for an expensive card that I'm happy with so I don't want to change unless I have no choice. I'd not be too concerned about latency as I don't think it'll be in the range of my "drunk of an evening" perceptual capacity.
The features of on-board just aren't there. There isn't a dedicated headphone amp on them either (unless they've changed but that still wouldn't convince me).
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