Anyone here ever modded a sound card?

[Old Thrashbarg]

I mean stuff like changing out capacitors, adding shielding and the like...

What were the results? I'm curious to hear opinions from people here, since most of what I've found has been on places like Head-Fi, and, well, frankly, I think you'd be hard pressed to assemble half a brain from the entire population of most of those 'audiophile' type forums. My cards wouldn't be considered 'worthy' in those circles anyway.

Anyhoo...

I have a couple old cards kicking around that I'm considering messing with a bit... the first is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which sounds alright as-is, but it's picking up a bit of interference inside my case, and I also see a bit of room for improvement in the values of some of the output caps. (Plus, it's covered in G-Luxons, which are the bane of motherboards and PSUs everywhere, so I can't imagine the ones on this card are much better quality.)

The second card is an old Diamond Sonic Impact S90... an Aureal Vortex 1 card. I've already solved the problem of getting the drivers to work under XP, but it's still pretty much unusable due to the outputs being so noisy. The card has a lot of promise... a decent Wolfson DAC and an onboard 6wpc (!) stereo amplifier, so I'd like to see what I can do with it. I'm thinking I'll prolly start with some better power filtering, an EMI shield, and swapping out the grossly undersized coupling caps on the amp.

I don't buy into the hype of BlackGates and fancy shielding paper and all that, so this will be using normal (but still decent quality... prolly Panasonic or Nichicon) capacitors and standard mu-metal (most likely to be salvaged from old LCD monitors or Dell cases if I can find enough).

It'll take awhile for me to assemble all the parts and materials I'll need, but I'll post back with reports of my results, and perhaps pictures if I can find a camera, once I get the cards done.

[ratbuddy]

That brings a question to mind. The latest rage in video cards and motherboards is having all solid caps. Any idea how those things sound in audio devices?

[Lotec25]

i added new caps and op amps to mine. and to tell the truth the only difference i see is the amount of power it outputs. actually made it worse and had to change all of my settings so it does not overpower. only cost me 10 bucks but i could of spent that on something else. if you have decent speakers. there doing all the work anyway. and if you have a preety good sound card i don't really see it helping that much anyway.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Any idea how those things sound in audio devices?

No idea actually, but generally speaking I see no inherent reason for them to sound bad. Now, remember, I'm also pretty skeptical of the whole boutique "audio capacitor" thing anyway, so as long as the solid caps have decent enough specs as far as low ESR and ripple current, they should sound fine.

The trouble with 'em is really more of a physical thing... most, if not all, of those solid types are surface mount, which would make it difficult to use them in place of standard through-hole electrolytics.

As far as my cards go... I'm not really intending to switch out op-amps or anything, since I'll at best gain limited benefits from that, and as you've found, Lotec, it could even cause problems. I figure that most modern op-amps are "good enough" so it's better to just leave the ones that you know work properly with the particular card.

Where my main problem lies is with EMI/RFI causing background noise, so I'm going to focus on power filtering and shielding, but while I'm at it I figure I may as well replace a couple capacitors in the output stage which I know to be undersized as per the datasheets on the components. Whether I hear a sonic benefit from the latter modification remains to be seen (it's more of an experiment, just to see what it does), but it won't cost that much and really can't hurt anything anyway.

Unfortunately I'm having a bit more trouble than I anticipated in finding the shielding metal I wanted. The scrap pile at work seems to be pretty slim pickings lately... I'll just keep an eye out there and perhaps in the meantime devise something out of aluminum foil to determine whether my plan will work at all. Basically what I'm going to do in that respect is make my own version of the cover that you see on cards like the top-end Xonar... basically box in all the electronics on the card.

[aja]

You can read up about it being done on X-Fi cards.

Google "X-Fi hotrod"

(i believe thats the term...)

[Lotec25]

best increase you can get. is use high quality mp3 files. IE FLAC

[Keitosha]

best increase you can get. is use high quality mp3 files. IE FLACFLAC isn't MP3. FLAC is a lossless format. Think about it as a zipped WAV file.

[Old Thrashbarg]

best increase you can get. is use high quality mp3 files. IE FLAC

Agreed, but that doesn't take care of background noise coming from the hardware. I mostly use Lame 3.97 -V0 --vbr-new for any encodes I do, since it's compatible with pretty much any player, though I also use FLAC on occasions when I'm not keeping a physical copy of the media for whatever reason.

I've seen some of the X-Fi mods... that's actually sorta what gave me the idea to work on my cards. Problem with a lot of the X-Fi mods though, is that they seem geared more toward audiophile e-peen (expensive capacitors, obscure op-amps, etc.) than actually solving any specific problem with the sound. What I'm intending to do is more along the lines of what this guy did to a Sound Blaster 16 (http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4140) [badcaps.net link], with apparently good results.

[Lotec25]

how about an external DAC then? like the emu 0404 usb? you can even mod if you so wish. i guess the big question here is how much cash you want to spend. And i do agree about the HI end Caps and op-amps. the biggest thing that helps from all i read when i modded my 0404 was the caps. They have some that are not to bad https://www.hndme.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=73
https://www.hndme.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=12

[Old Thrashbarg]

i guess the big question here is how much cash you want to spend.

That's part of the reason why I'm working on my existing sound cards. I tend to only buy something new after I determine that I can't make what I have work. These cards would be plenty fine were it not for the background noise on the outputs. If I can get rid of the background noise (or at least reduce it to an acceptable level), then I'll be set, and for only a few bucks in parts.

I have looked into DACs a little bit, but it's kind of a last resort for me, and if I do end up going that route, I'd prolly pick a Zhaolu or Citypulse or the like. I won't even consider anything from Emu, simply on the fact that it's Creative-owned.

[Lotec25]

the only problem is are you sure that the noise is coming from the sound card? And it is not the speakers catching noise from the power plug? Just an idea. If that is the problem then i would move to an optical cable with some speakers that will take an optical plug. Since i have moved to optical i have not had a noise problem. And i know what your talking about i remember the days of me using my audigy zs and getting noise threw the speakers. I think the only option you might have is try to replace the caps and opamps. you can get free samples from http://www.linear.com/pc/productDetail.jsp?navId=H0,C1,C1154,C1009,C1022,P1 106

and the caps are not that much maybe 10 bucks to update the caps etc and see if it works.

Or go optical like i did. Cost more but in the end it was worth it. I am not talking alot of cash either. I have a cheap sony receiver cost me 50 bucks and some bookshelf speakers.

[Old Thrashbarg]

I just did a preliminary test of shielding, using aluminum foil and cardboard, on my Santa Cruz. It does indeed make a difference in the noise floor, although it didn't eliminate the hiss completely. Once I get ahold of some actual mu-metal and attach a more solid ground, I expect it to work even better. The next step will be power filtering caps. I'll have to order the parts, but that'll be put off for a bit since I'm going out of town for awhile starting next weekend.

I'm not going to do the op-amps, since, as I said above, I don't expect to gain much from doing so, and it could potentially cause problems. That would go against the "only fix what's broke" approach I'm taking on this project.

Or go optical like i did. Cost more but in the end it was worth it. I am not talking alot of cash either. I have a cheap sony receiver cost me 50 bucks and some bookshelf speakers.

Not happening for me. Only one of the sound cards I have even has a digital output, and it's coaxial, and none of my stereo equipment handles digital input. Even if I used the coaxial SPDIF, I'd still need a decent DAC (a $50 Sony receiver would be a massive downgrade in my system), and if I were to do that, I'd may as well just get a USB DAC. Some ghetto-rigged shielding and $10 in caps just seems a better option.

[Sir Barton]

I won't even consider anything from Emu, simply on the fact that it's Creative-owned.
Creative owns E-MU, but the similarities stop there. When Creative bought E-MU they left the E-MU guys still design and make the cards...no change in quality at all. I used to use a 1212M for my music listening and was a fantastic sounding card.