Onboard audio quality on par with soundcard

[UltraTaco]

I was plugging back and forth between onboard audio and creative soundcard and they both sound excellent! I think a lot of playback is related to software engancement?

I mean professionally working you want a discreet card, but for listening to mp3s, it's great!

What about gaming? I haven't played anything that has hardware accelerated sound in a while. I remember call of duty had somewhat different sounds with soundcard, and so was brothers in arms, but also performance would drop a bit(I had pentium4 2ghz)

Onbiard audio: Asus p6t deluxe
Card: creative xFi fatality something

 

[chop_wood]

Onboard audio has come a long way since a p4 . Requiring anthing beyond modern onboard you would need high end speakers / headphones at least like $300+ .. xfi is getting old, but i guess a 1st gen mobo like the p6t kinda goes with that era.

 

[Dolk]

Not necessarily chop_wood, some boards route their audio lines horribly or do not provide enough capacitance to filter out noise. I would say low end motherboards can be tolerable at best, but most mid range and high end motherboards will beat that expensive external sound card. However, there are some sound cards that do better because they take advantage of higher quality routed PCI-E lanes.

 

[EarthDog]

I have to agree with chop... to really appreciate a QUALITY discrete sound card over MODERN integrated, a pretty decent set of speakers or cans are almost required to hear a difference.

For the OP, his integrated audio is ancient and most(all?) modern discrete cards and integrated sound (Realtek ALC1150/ALC1220) SHOULD sound better, especially with decent units outputting the sound.

That said, most of the QUALITY discrete cards will match or surpass integrated audio codecs. It just depends on a few factors as Dolk as alluding to above.

 

[Witchdoctor]

A cheap DAC can make a big difference if listening to high quality content,

https://www.amazon.com/Audioengine-...id=1516977609&sr=8-3&keywords=audioengine+dac

For gaming and typical content the higher end Realtek chips are ok

Another consideration is pushing higher end headphones depending on the Impedance

 

[petteyg359]

A cheap DAC can make a big difference if listening to high quality content,

https://www.amazon.com/Audioengine-...id=1516977609&sr=8-3&keywords=audioengine+dac

For gaming and typical content the higher end Realtek chips are ok

Another consideration is pushing higher end headphones depending on the Impedance

That specific device seems to have a really bad failure mode of deafening screeches...

 

[UltraTaco]

Thank you everyone, I remember my p4 onboard audio, don't really remember/know which board it had, but plugging a sound card and playing music sounded better, but I mean onboard audio wasn't horrible to start with,ain reason I got sound card at that time was doing some audio editing (hoby) and wanted to try out EAX in games. Music sounded more vibrant with the card. BTW, should I plugged headphones in the card?

Fast forward to when I got new pic, Alienware, I tried onboard audio and it was fine, but decided to buy an inexpensive soundcard just because it wasn't expensive and I liked better sound. Seems what I found out is sound from the card sounds better it seems more because of software they provide for tweaking things, but I mean once all enhancements disabled, sound seems the same...I remember a plug-in for Windows that made sound wicked good when listening to music, forgot what it's called, can't find it. They used some fancy algorithms to emulate old lamp equipment to create rich sound and great deep bass. Heavy on cpu cycles though (when I had p4...it used like 30% for processing)

Anyways, I mean we're not talking about pro music authoring where you need extra cabalities and real-time sound processing not available from integ. sound. We're just talking about listening to music and watching some videos..

 

[Alaric]

If you're only listening to mp3 audio, the equipment makes less difference than if they were lossless like FLAC. Get some high resolution music files and check both again. If there is still no difference then it is the gear further down the chain (amp, speakers).

 

[petteyg359]

Also all that "fancy algorithms" stuff is not "restoring" anything, despite the marketing department's claims. It's adding crap that was never in the original audio, and that's anything but great if you're actually into good sound reproduction.

 

[UltraTaco]

Well, to be fair to all that crap being added, it's not always bad. Makes it sound better. We're not talking about restoring anything..just listening.

I don't have anything lossless ATM, Alaric, but listening to music, you can hardly find anything lossless anyways..

Well, point is, it's not all that bad pair it with a good amp and it looks sound great!

 

[Alaric]

you can hardly find anything lossless anyways..

51.5 GBs on my storage drive. LOL