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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: noisyturtle on Thu, 12 June 2025, 21:13:37
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With most people using integrated sound from their mobo, with many modern mobos having built-in amps and dac, is there any real point to using a slotted soundcard. All I can think of is if you're running a 7.1 setup and need the extra ports. Is the quality improvement noticeable? How do companies like Creative stay in business in 2025?
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No there's no point.
Dac and Amp are solved problems. Unless they're defectively designed, which is rare these days, the freq response of the speaker + in room effect is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more Distortion than what the Dac/Amp outputs.
The only thing relevant in terms of PC audio today is the Power Supply, where a bad one can dump hissing electrical noise into the motherboard. This is typically not a design criteria, it's hit or miss if you go into the market place. You can look for ones with the least ripple voltage, because it indicates competent design, it's not a guarantee.
You can get around this with optical out to a validated usb DAC on separate power. SU-1, unbalanced dac is the best value.
Fancier dacs, and going balanced is not worth it, it's entirely audiophile flexing, it makes no perceptible difference to sound, Because again, the distortion of speakers and room mod is the bottleneck, which represent an insurmountable law of physical constraint.
If you're using usb dac, on amd platform, as long as it's a usb native port, the latency is fine, if you're on intel, some boards will have bad usb latency through dmi pipe sharing, so you might want to get a dedicated pcie usb controller, or use optical.
If you want uncompressed 7.1, you have to go through HDMI. There are no dacs for that, you're looking at receivers. Here again, it'll be a latency problem, some receivers are just terrible.
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Seriously, no idea...
I do have Creative Sound Blaster AE-5, they really improved a lot sound quality, but no more 7.1 on internal ones at the moment on the best ones and the software is just ruined that the sound card lost all it's power, now high power 5.1 sounds more like low power 2.1 >:D
Have to use 2 other apps just to bring the good old CMSS back which is annoying, since they lack a good upmix now.
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I ordered one for fun, there was a great sale on the Creative site + the additional daughterboard expansion card for free. I'm a sucker for unnecessary hardware, and I need the optical-out which the Sabertooth does not have built in.
Will report back with how the Sound Blaster Audigy Fx V2 performs once I get my comp cleaned and rebuilt!
7.1 sound, DSD256 playback(highest audio res. to date), built-in 120dB DAC
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Interestingly, the most discussion I see concerning sound cards concerns building retro PCs.
If somebody is rehabilitating an old Pentium or Core 2 Duo, they can build it as a Dos up to Windows XP or so PC. If you are DOS gaming, in particular, on real hardware, you want a real sound card.
You can go the expensive route and try to find a classic card, or I think there are some repro / compatible or rebuilt cards produced in China. Although there are many processors that will support older OSes, and many ways to output video, you tend to need an actual sound card for best results.