$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best

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."

That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drivers.

[PaulGaskin]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit, being subsidized to keep drivers out of the hands of free software developers?

Moot with Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since EAX doesn't work in Vista [ign.com] anymore, does this really matter anymore?

Re:Sound Cards

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, onboard sound is getting better, for what that's worth. And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.

But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell. It's kind of like suggesting upgrading your monitor or video card if you're only going to be watching YouTube. Hopefully at least a few developers are using high quality sounds in their games...

Re:tell the difference?

[TheMeuge]

"who needs to spend $300 on one of these cards creative put out?" Hopefully nobody. One may, however, need to spend money of a good sound card, in order to output to a decent audio system. For me, the absolutely deal-breaker is Creative's insistence of resampling all 44.1kHz content to 48kHz. I don't rely on my sound card to do any of the work - I just want it to take the data, and faithfully stream it via SPDIF into my external DAC. That's why for many years now, I've been enjoying the services of the M-Audio Revolution.

Re:Sound Cards

[drgonzo59]

Because for really good audio sound cards inside a computer case are not a good idea so might as well go with a crappy one for testing or just use the bundled one. In general D/A conversion needs to be performed outside the computer case, in a specialized box. So that is why people spend tons of money on a computer then spend a lot more money on a USB / Ethernet digital audio platform.

Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[Marrow]

Why shouldn't all decoding be moved out to the speakers? Just send them binary data and let
the analog rendering be done as far from the noisy elements of the computer as possible.

Re:Why pay for ads to geeks when /. will up for fr

[Xtravar]

Eh, at least it's ASUS and not another Apple spoogefest.

Re:Sound Cards

[billcopc]

You almost sound like a troll, but i'll bite.

Turtle beach = YES. I don't know why they bother, but this tiny company makes great little sound cards. Simple, but clean. Their sound quality puts many "pro" cards to shame.

Bose = GOD NO! I mean, if you like the Bose sound, that's your preference and that's fine, but the term "playback quality" refers to reproducing the original sound as accurately as possible, something Bose speakers don't even try to accomplish.

The thing with sound is there are two main schools of thought: those who seek accurate reproduction, and those who seek "pleasant" reproduction. Studio monitors, high-end headphones and some brands of tower speakers shoot for accurate sound, which many people find cold and dry. Bose speakers typically produce "happy" sound, by using a gazillion drivers and psychoacoustic sound processing (think SRS).

Creative's X-Fi also specializes in this "happy" sound through the use of the so-called Crystallizer. It takes normal, clean audio, and adds the sonic equivalent of glitter dust to appeal to the aural magpies of this world. A few people dislike it (like me), but many people enjoy the effect it has on popular recordings.

So then, what do non-Bose non-Creative users lack ? Happy sound. I personally don't miss any of that stuff, and I have zero issues with my featureless onboard 8-channel sound and my cold-sounding high-end speakers. Even the Asus sound card doesn't tempt me one bit, because the features it offers, I don't want. It would be nice if a sound card could be just that: a sound processing accelerator, but in 2008 the CPU is more than capable of handling the cheap bandpass filters and flanging effects Creative calls "environmental audio". The fact that even Creative uses software EAX emulation for its cheaper products is proof of this, and the only reason it doesn't work on other cards is because of licensing/IP issues.

Re:Sound Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that a real sound card is needed for gaming. But most people are surprisingly deaf and can't hear the difference, and so most game companies don't want to spend the time and money on proper audio.

One of the best games to demonstrate the difference between onboard and hardware-accelerated audio is Bioshock. Using my onboard Realtek HD with 5.1 speakers, I get a muddy mess of sounds. I couldn't stand it and decided to get an X-Fi and the difference is amazing. I can hear the difference between sounds coming from, say, down the stairs or just round the corner. Watery echos and long hallways sound like the would.

Sound is not just some bonus feature, like DX10 vs DX9. It adds significantly to your perception. I still remember the exhilaration when I upgraded to 5.1 sound and was able to spin around and frag someone just behind me because of the accurate positional audio. And there are of course stories of blind people playing video games entirely by sound.

Re:Sound Cards

[jandrese]

I just wish USB soundcards weren't such a hack. It always seemed to me that firewire would be perfect for external sound cards, but nobody seems to do that, at least not at the consumer level.

Re:Sound Cards

[IronChef]

And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.

The cool thing about Dolby Digital Live encoding is the game doesn't have to support Dolby Digital. The sound card and drivers magically remix positional DirectSound events into a Dolby Digital bitstream.

In other words, I plug my computer into my AV receiver with 1 audio cable and surround sound Just Works in all my games.

But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell.

Even if the sound quality was terrible I'd want to know if there was a level 3 sentry behind me. Surround sound makes games more enjoyable.

Re:Why have analog sound devices in the computer?

[enoz]

Last time I checked, amplifiers didn't have 100 million transistors operating up to Gigahertz pumping out EMF.

Anyway I agree with the GP (is the Parent a troll?).

If you have a digital source you may as well keep the signal digital for as long as possible because as soon as you go through a DAC you will start introducing noice into the equation.

Digital Receivers (amps) take a digital input such as PCM or AC3, decode, and pump the output to speakers. And they sound great.

Re:People still buy soundcards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, CPUs. You're talking about Soundstorm, which I agree is a fantastic onboard sound solution, it's what I still use to this day in my audio box. The trouble is, Athlon (barton) 3200+ just doesn't kick as much ass as it used to. To say nothing of no PCI-E options, or RAM past 4 gig, or SATA2 or so forth. My point is, they don't make Soundstorm mobos anymore, and for people like you and I who like the idea of doing the D->A in the reciever rather than the computer this is our first high-quality economical option since the Xbox 1 (which also had a soundstorm mobo). It's big news even without the higher resolutions, frequencies, and number of channels. I'm thinking it's finally time to switch to PCI-E (I'm not a gamer).

My big question is can Asus come up with better software for upmixing stereo to 7.1 than nVidia did to get from stereo to 5.1? nVidia's software worked, but it was rather fragile... and linux support for it was a joke. Hey, that reminds me, I may finally be able to run this Ubuntu thing I've heard so much about (without switching back to windows just to get the sub channel going).

Re:Sound Cards

[adolf]

No - it's not hard. But it's also not very popular.

I'd wager that most folks, these days, never do any serious recording of audio. It's just not something that there are very many practical applications for in a modern world. And even when they do want to bring analog audio into a computer, it's probably only as a part of a video capture or VOIP rig, and they're just not paying much attention to the fidelity. And even when they do have a need to do serious recording and are paying attention, only the most glaring amounts of audible noise and distortion are likely to be noticed. People are generally pretty tolerant of relatively bad-sounding audio.

If the need were more common or they were paying more attention, cheap sound cards would commonly have the same huge number of reasonably good inputs as they currently do outputs, because that's what the market would demand..

Myself, I've been looking for a decent, cheap 4-channel sound input into the PC for years -- I've got a few old quad recordings of various rock music on 1/4" reels which I really want to listen to, but I will only do so in the presence of something with which to archive it with (the tapes are so old that it's not unlikely that playing them even once will destroy them).

Lately, the additional need for 4 or 8 (though preferably 12 or 16) inputs has risen as I'd like to begin making some live recordings of a band that I've been working with.

It's not hard to find sound card or external Firewire/USB box which can do these things -- it's just hard to justify the expense.

But it's not the expense which is keeping people away from recording on a PC, but rather just the fact that these sorts of tasks are esoteric enough that most people will never do them. Therefore, the market is, and is likely to remain, very thin.

Like RAID storage, backup devices, SAS drives, DVI-connected LCD monitors configured with 1:1 pixel ratios (instead of BlurryVision and/or FatPersonVision), most folks just don't have any reason to care about this aspect of computing.

Re:Sound Cards

[UncleRage]

And here's another voice from the choir.

My main sound comes from a M-Audio Firewire Audiophile running into an Anthem preamp, Adcom amp and then into a set of B&W's for monitors.

What's my Audigy 2 used for? Skype.

Creative makes such trash.

objective engineering

[epine]

You're missing the main point, which was central to Shannon's theorem from way back in 1948: an optimal digital encoding process will achieve 100% quality up to, but not exceeding, channel capacity as dictated by the noise model.

Corrupted bits are easy to detect on the receiving side of any digital channel with a relatively trivial modicum of error correction.

If the receiving end of the digital channel sucks so bad it doesn't have a way to report that bits are being dropped or corrupted due to a substandard link, why not just randomly spend three to ten times as much to buy a possibly superior cable, and still be uncertain at the end of the day if you solved the problem, or even if the problem originally existed.

While you're at it, take a walk through the wild side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases [wikipedia.org]

Now why is it that all this high end digital audio equipment can't be equipped with a little orange LED that signals digital link fault (lost or corrupted bits)?

Gosh, could it be that it's just not possible to run a mid-grade LSFR in silicon at audio data rates to detect channel bit errors?

The consumer audio industry is built on the fundamental premise: at every juncture, remain subjective.

My DVD player doesn't report bad frames or bit recovery statistics. Internally, the stupid thing knows. It just refuses to say. If I could stick a balky DVD into a couple of different players to see if I get the same error profile, it would be pretty easy to figure out whether the disk or the player was at fault. I guess that would only benefit the consumer, not the vendor.

I don't care whether your amp cost $20k. If it doesn't have an indicator for link faults concerning its digital inputs, the company isn't in the business of enabling objective decisions.

A properly engineered digital channel exists in an objective evaluation space. It's impossible to stress this strongly enough. No matter how much the equipment costs, if the quality of the digital channel is not reported objectively, either the equipment was badly engineered, or engineered to an agenda that conflicts with objectivity.

If you find that hard to swallow, consider the PRML algorithm used to recover bits from the analog signal reported by your drive head. Bit error rates of 10^-14 from an analog signal that is at best only a weak facsimile of the signal originally recorded, extracted at Gbits/s by a chip the size of your fingernail, in a product costing under $100.

The disk drive people find solutions, where the audio people facing a problem three orders of magnitude less difficult manufactures vagueness.

Guess which group read and understood Shannon's theorem, and wished their customers to benefit from this excellent piece of work. Before Shannon's paper, smart engineers did suffer from confusion about whether digital perfection was a reality or a chimera. Sixty years later, it's sadly ignorant that this is still debated.