Can anyone please explain to me to the point of discrete sound cards? What is wrong with using embedded one...

Can anyone please explain to me to the point of discrete sound cards? What is wrong with using embedded one? And why the hell they cost so much?

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There was time when the only sound chip built into your computer was the PC speaker. Thus there was a large market for discrete sound cards. Nowadays the integrated sound hardware should be more than enough for 99% of users. Thus the discrete market is tiered towards professionals and hobbyists and priced as such.

thanks.

>the discrete market is tiered towards professionals and hobbyists

Nice way to say audiophool

Wow informative, concise, and straight to the point. GG user A+

It was more than just the lack of sound chip, the very task of processing sound itself was fairly expensive, especially if you were playing a multiplayer game where you could have dozens of sound sources firing off at once.
Back when all CPUs were single-core, any additional task other than what the CPU was doing was increasingly expensive to calculate, and forcing the CPU to handle audio would slam your CPU usage. So if you didn't want to play with flat tinny audio and have only a couple of things make sound at once, you pretty much had to have a sound card.
On top of that, sound cards also had to tackle not just sound playback, but also synthesis, because disk/drive space was at a premium and many games relied on synthesized sound tracks that played directly from a chip on the card, meaning that the same game could have had varied sound depending on the hardware you played it on.
Because sound was fully processed/created on the sound card (only ones as late as the X-Fi Titanium, the new ones are simply DSPs), they also had highly advanced spatialization effects, with various PC games supporting true 360º surround, and not the "simulated" surround we have now that's mixed from a 5.1 or 7.1 feed.

placebo marketing. yes the high price is definitely because of the higher quality components and not just to make you think its better.

Some boards have shit amps which can't drive proper headphones.

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In those cases it's better to just buy an external amp instead, it's better and cheaper than wasting money on a sound card every time.

the quality is far better even with a noob tier creative card
the resources a discrete card eats is as nothing
it uses only one irq
they have dedicated DAC for lower freq resulting on a far better bass(not really important for many but if you have a 5.1 or a 7.1 and dont care about the bass you are doing something wrong)
most of the dedicated one has a far better control panel than the realtek one...

Your money

E-peen and overspending for small return.

Well, if you run an older board (I'm still rocking an X58 with a Westmeme Xeon), the onboard sound quality can degrade. Idk if it's the caps drying, if it was shitty all along or if it is my 1080Ti overloading everything, but I could hear noticeable interference with higher volumes.
Also new features. The card i bought (Xonar DSX) has a socketed headphone amp IC but most importantly can adjust for shifted speaker positions AND has DTS connect, which means I can wire it up to my AV receiver on the opposite side of the room and easily run 5.1 over a single optical cable, even if the center speaker is dead behind me.

bought a xonar ages ago and just kept carrying it over to new builds. drivers are a bitch but there are custom ones. still, fuck asus

Musicians kinda need them to lower latencies when playing MIDI keyboards and/or using external hardware synthesizers inside your DAWs mix.
There really is no other good point besides this.

I have a Xonar D2 from a long time and it rocks. I don't know if you guys are deaf or something but quality is noticeable comparing it to an integrated sound card.

Nowadays seems way better to acquire an USB DAC, tough.

So you could passthrough a soundcard into your VM

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I replaced a discrete internal sound card with an external audio interface (I do some recordings). Using SPDIF to the external DAC for everyday usage.

>not passing the internal sound card and connecting it to a usb dac

2 words: Japanese capacitors

I own one of these cards, I bought it for my old build which had garbage onboard audio, and I've moved it into my new build.

It is by no way necessary but it does have nice features like the aux-in and a optical-in which means for now I have my turntable and PS4 routed into it and a 5.1 speaker system/headphones out, which I can switch between on the fly. The sound quality is good too which I actually haven't tested against my new on board audio chipset (yet).

in 2018 it is placebo

yeah, he should be banned from Jow Forums for this

This,
Most soundcards on the market are actually 10 year old designs, struggeling to get win10 drivers.
I remember back in 2010 i had an athlon 64 2500something. Couldnt play cnc renegade multiplayer and listen to music. It was too taxing and caused crashes. A soundcard would have fixed this.

Soundcards today are retarded. You either drive high impedance headphones and do that with an external dac, or external speakers, in most cases connected to an amplifier. In this case you connect by toslink to prevent ground loops

>Can anyone please explain to me to the point of discrete sound cards?
There are different kinds of sound cards with different purposes.

>What is wrong with using embedded one?
Nothing, most of the time. Sometimes they are noisy (this was much more common in the past).

>And why the hell they cost so much?
Again, there are different kinds. Some are very cheap.

In most cases they are useless, unless you have really shitty onboard audio. In some cases you need one, like when you bought 600 Ohm T1s. Only highend onboard cards can drive such.

I still use my Xonar 1st gen. I have unofficial Win 8.1 drivers for it. There is no difference to the newer Xonar, but you get the old ones cheap now.

Just dont get cheap soundcards, these often have problems with interference and arent necessary unless your onboard audio dies.

What if I don't like heaphones, are there any soundcards for surround sound?

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most likely your onboard sound already has full 5.1 surround outputs

Better dac
Virtualization software

Anyway you can do with a good external dac too. Usually on board dacs are just shit tier

You get what you pay for.

Still use an old X-Fi. Onboard audio can't power high impedance headphones..

even $5 CMI sound cards can output 5.1 sound, assuming you have a 5.1 sound set.

and is it any good?

depends

And? Almost all non-shit motherboards use Japanese caps now all across the board. Most use Nichicon's "Fine Gold" audio-specific caps for their audio section.

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Yeah. If you're worried about it, just go out and buy a dac x6 dac/amp. $50 and vastly better than any internal card(onboard or discrete). Its not an amazing dac/amp mind you, but its about the cheapest one you can find that is still better than what you're almost definitely using already.

I had to write the Linux driver for this card. Reason I use one is because onboard is noisy, the Sound Blaster Z isn't. Six months of reverse engineering well spent.

Thank you for your work.

Used thus twice but I'll let it slide

Some sound cards can do Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect, which can conpress discrete 5.1 from your OS and send it to your sound system over single optical cable. Some support room adjustment, even for 5.1, etc...

>has DTS connect, which means I can wire it up to my AV receiver on the opposite side of the room and easily run 5.1 over a single optical cable
Most motherboards that aren't absolute shit tier have this capability now.

>Passing sound through a lossy USB cable that introduces noise and static
No thanks

kek

they use external USB DACs because muh interference
sound cards are used basically only when you need to record and process high-quality mutichannel audio afaik

good enough unless you belong on /hpg/

Fuck, I miss my Audigy 2 and kX Project drivers.

big if true

well you pretty much get what you pay for

You might want to listen to music discretely...

I have had a ton of different motherboards from 775 skt all the way to AM4 and non of them sounded anywhere near as good as my sound cards on 5.1 or headphones despite all the SNR claims on the boxes.
I found most of them where capable of providing clean static free sound with no hiccups but they lacked amplification, everything sounded dull and flat compared to the sound card which I use with all the EQ/effects shit disabled.
The major issue with onboard is the mic recording quality is fucking terrible.

Currently using the soundcard in the OP and its great especially since dont have to unplug anything to switch between 5.1 and headphones because it has dedicated 3.5mm for headhphones.
pic related

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I guess linux support sucks cocks anyway, internal and external alike?

>usb
>lossy

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I to, use an Xonar DGX. It rocks. Back in the day I used Creative Audigy and Audigy 2 ZS cards. Those were the good old days. Still got them both. (Not the gimped "Value" editions either)

Why don’t you have surround speakers or Front L/R on if you got a 5.1 speaker set up?

>optional speakers
>full range speakers

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lrn2read

I found the mic stuff neat as I was reverse engineering the driver, it uses the onboard DSP to provide the sound effects. Only issue is, it has to drop the sample rate down to 16khz to keep up with the processing it does. The thing actually becomes less responsive once the 'CrystalVoice' features are enabled.
That DSP though is the same one as the one on the Creative X-Fi. And the new AE-5 has the same DSP too, so Creative has been coasting on that thing since like 2005. Pretty crazy.

good to know, i don't use it anyway

what's a decent sound card guys?

Most musicians use external interfaces. Even pro studios often use HDX systems which are tied into PCIe but the actual IO is in an external case.

comanx360?

Yes.

nice, mate! Didn't think you're an Jow Forumsentleman.
How is the progress on the AE-5 going? As i read your szatement it being unique in a way.

I went ahead and bought one, it'll get here tomorrow. There was just too much weird stuff going on in the dumps I had of it to really be able to tell what it was doing, but with it on hand, I'll be able to understand it quite a bit better. I have the init stuff written, it's just the actual post DSP load stuff that needs done.
I'm hoping to have it done within the next two weeks, but there's no way to really know until I dig into it.

no pressure man! Sounds like it could be difficult to figure out the stramge behavior then. I could imagine the leds being a "problem" too, in sense of giving strange reading, but then again i have basically no clue what i'm sctually talking about other than QCAdump being a thing, which i assume you're referring to.
And thank you.

No problem.
Yeah, I haven't yet figured out how the LED's are addressed, but they could be what's making it seem strange. There's basically a ton of writes to the second PCI region, which on the Sound Blaster Z and Recon3D is really only used for GPIO. There are just way too many writes to it on the AE-5. My initial guess was LED's, but I guess I'll find out once I start testing.
If it does turn out to be the LED's, I'd like to find some way to have control of them in Linux, which may require some sort of custom ioctl or maybe alsamixer control. I haven't looked too much into it.

based.

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>Not using HIFI lossless usb-C cable and passing through noise absorbing audio beads to deliver crystal clear audio.

My embedded soundcard gets this ridiculous noise when the processor goes full throttle. The only option is an external one

Top tier probs dont evrn use this crap because its all external either desktop dacs or rackmounted stuff

get a proper dac amp and use your headphones/speakers like a man

Scarlett 2i2 1gen working flawless in debian 9, just look for a class compliant USB device.
>Winshit constant dropouts, bsod with every update, ancient asio drivers, poor latency
>GNU/Linux No drivers, 0 latency, richer bass, warmer mids, LIBRE highs

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>mate!
>!
>man!
>!
>the absolute state of reddit migrants, wave 8(one wave per year)

Oh, that explains sound quality in older video games

>my first computer had a bad microphone input
>second motherboard had bad audio
>THIRD motherboard had bad front ports, maybe bad audio entirely
Help, I've been using the same $12 44.1khz 16-bit audio for like 12 years

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A lot of studios are still stuck using Pentium 4/Athlon 64 PCs with sound cards because all their equipment still uses Firewire.

Remember when you had to add ram to your sound card?

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My onboard sound died so I had to buy a soundcard to use a microphone(I use an audio interface for output). It was cheaper than buying a new motherboard and new ram.

> point of discrete sound cards?
ASIO drivers
No sound stutter in games
It sounds clearer when volume is cranked up to the max, no background noise or much less of it.

>had to
You never really HAD TO, but using larger or custom sound fonts on games certainly made the music sound better.

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autism

Some higher end motherboards actually use a Creative chip instead of Realtek so you can use Alchemy, their virtual surround sound emulator for older games. It's funny how there are a lot of games like Half Life Source which have inferior audio to the original games.

>tfw ACCESS DENIED in HD

That is because Creative Labs, C-Media, and a few others shit the bed writing audio drivers for Windows XP. Microsoft gave their audio stack the WinModem treatment and game developers stopped giving a shit about positional audio. The drivers eventually did come out, but by then the damage was done.

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This right here. There is no reason to get a dedicated Sound Card over an External AMP/DAC stack. It's simply cheaper for better quality.

they had merit back then, but nowadays they're memes used to trick retarded gaymers. a dedicated same priced external dac and amp will be far superior to any sound card

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>tfw being here since 2004 and being shit on by madfags

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Soundcards should come with synth chips or something like like the oldest cards did so they can play their own music and do stuff beside just playback

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That would be kinda stupid, just get one with MIDI I/O and connect synthesizers externally.

because motherboard-based sound is susceptible to small amounts of interference. if you're trying to produce pure sounds, you want something that is free of almost all interference.

Wouldn't a USB audio interface be a better idea for that?

...

The main issue is is Windows, DirectX 10 only supports software sound which killed hardware-accelerated synthesis. Around the same time dual and quad core CPUs started becoming more popular which meant audio was no longer an issue with game performance.

Interference/noise, input delay and cpu usage goes to 0 with one of these. If you care about sound quality you should get one.

USB has higher latency and driver overhead than PCI-e or Firewire. USB 2.0's real world performance is significantly lower than it's theoretical performance.

USB interfaces have higher latency, which only concerns those who actually play notes by hand on a MIDI keyboard or other controllers.
PCI soundcards with external DACs exist and are the best solution used by pretty much every professional studio nowadays, bot those are really expensive.
My guess is that Thunderbolt is the future.

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I use a $3 USB sound card (a different model from those $1 USB sound cards with a different chip!) because the one on my mobo died a long time ago. I have a old PCI Xonar card, too, but Xonar has abysmal Windows drivers. Even with enthusiasts' work I keep getting blue screens and memory leaks with them. It's fine in Linux, though.

source?

That'll be kind of expensive and impractical.
Yes, this is an issue that doesn't get talked about too much.
Still, maybe someone could had found a passthrough to get the chip working.