$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best 387
EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."
Sound Cards (Score:3, Insightful)
My sound card - a Turtle Beech Catalina cost about what this does and was worth every penny, especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub.
Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Any info on ALSA support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
tell the difference? (Score:4, Insightful)
i haven't been able to tell the difference between my old live and my brandnew supposed "HD" soundcard. maybe on some seriously expensive speakers and a full THX system i could, but who needs to spend $300 on one of these cards creative put out?
Re:Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a desktop speaker pair and thats all I want and need. On board sound is just fine for me.
Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for free? (Score:4, Insightful)
creative cards are dookie (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Sound Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like getting a decent motherboard may matter in this case. Investing in better speakers is probably more important than the sound card... unless you have a top notch 5/7.1 system, the soundcard will not be the bottleneck.
Re:Sound Cards (Score:3, Insightful)
People still buy soundcards? (Score:5, Insightful)
I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.
Re:Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see any point in using it for pre-generated sound, because, as you said, the audio has already been mangled.
What I find a high-end soundcard indispensable for, however, is recording audio.
Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People still buy soundcards? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wanted good quality stereo sound so I bought the Behringer B2031A speakers for around £200 and the M-Audio Revolution 5.1 for about £40 which together is cheaper than just the digital preamp capable of this kind of quality.
What pre-amp and speakers do you have?
Re:People still buy soundcards? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Preach it!
I'll go one further. It's not just that they don't provide value for money, Creative actually makes the worst soundcards I have ever, ever used. They aren't as good as the onboard RealTeks that come with your mobo, and of course can't hold a candle to a proper M-Audio (I used to use a Delta 1010). Both of these options sound better and install with less fuss and operate with less trouble.
To hell with Creative!
wow, WTF is *this* shit?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Emphasis added.)
I think I just now died a little bit on the inside.
Re:Sound Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
Similarly, the frequency response of their speakers makes them stand out when you compare speakers, but pay a bit more attention and you'll notice the frequency response is as flat as a mountain range.
IOW, they don't care about what sounds good, they care about marketing to the unwashed masses.
Re:Sound Cards (Score:3, Insightful)
I would never describe what I hear from a Bose sound as muddled. One thing I know they do though is put the same sound through every indirect speaker, but louder through the direct speaker as a cue for echolocation. If it is not set up properly, or if your perception of sound varies significantly from most the population than this could present a big problem. You shouldn't hear muddled sound though, as the brain does an excellent job at filtering out a lot of sound - in the case of a direct/indirect system the result should be clean sound or a constant echo - anything in between would be due to a non-standard model of hearing.