Best Audio Card?

[konakona]

midori has proven in this thread that he's one of the few pc audio 'experts' on these boards. 90% of users here just yell out "Audigy 2 ZS" when the issue of sound comes up. He obviously knows a lot more about the subject than you, or me.

not really an expert, just a poor headphone lover trying to get the best out of my audio most times i get my audio related news and reviews from head-fi.

Midori, how is the quality of the optical out on that chaintech AV-710? Is it better than Soundstorm?

i was curious about the same thing and followed some of the threads on head-fi and concluded the difference between the cards exists but not that huge. cant really be sure on this as i have no experience with digital outs. once i get my cashflow going i am getting myself a AOS piccolo DAC, stay tuned

I was looking at the Chaintech card at Newegg and came across Gainward 7.1 card. It uses the same VIA ENVY24 HT-S decoder that Chaintech uses but has EAX 2.0 which is missing from Chaintech card. Otherwise it looks like it's the same card. It's $6 more than Chaintech card but wouldn't this be good card for gamer /music since it has EAX 2.0 and uses Envy24 HT-S?

gaming wasnt my main concern, thus i didnt really take a time to look into gaming API support when i got my card; however, i am willing to bet they are pretty similar hardware wise. even with the chaintech card, we are using the generic driver from VIA, meaning the chaintech and the gainward will be two cards built on identical chips with the same set of drivers. i tend to agree gainward being a more reputable brand, but i grew wary of the quality of the DAC they use on the gainward card. alas, the link to the manual on gainward site appears to be broken, there is no way of telling which DAC it is...

virtualgames0 : those are some quality pix, keep 'em coming

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: midori

Plus your also recommending a person should go out and get some used card of dubious history vs a brand new card from a nice online retailer. Which is all fine and dandy, but I am sure your aware of the nice things that happen to electronics if they are abused or as they age. May not make much of a difference in digital "purity" since the circuity compinsates for it because of nature of digital design, but the analog portions are going to start suffering when those capasitiers start drying out from heat and age.

thank you for proving my theory of you not paying attention to other peoples's posts. where did i ever say anything that would imply he should get a used card? i did list a used revo as an acceptable variant, but my main pick was a brand new AV-710 from newegg. do you have trouble reading stuff?

Ya, "your main pick" was 25 bucks, and it's wonderfull "if you realy know what your doing"

Didn't this come from you?

you dont mind shelling out $75 on a soundcard but not added $24 for superior sound? Well LAUDY-F_ING-DA, in your own words. it woulda been a whole different story if i told him to go all out and burn a whole thru his wallet on EMU1212 or Lynx2. what is a friggin $25 to you when you have a $500+ computer?

75 + 25 = 100. You hundred dollar pick from the beginning was the used card. The m-audio revo. I assumed your were refering to the same thing. Am I wrong, if then what other 100 dollar card did you refer too??

this yet again leads to fortify my belief in your inability to read. bashing a audigy out of hand? hardly. seeing how mere a sight of factual criticism of your beloved product is enough to stir up some emotion in you, anger management is something you might need.

I can read just fine. Maybe it wasn't so much the the "bashing" per say, but it's the condisending attitude that gets to me at times, makes me react irrationally time to time.

I don't give a sh!t about the stupid card, I don't have some irrational attactments to innanimate objects. I am not brand loyal or any such nonsense.. Creative is a decent company as companies go, but other then that I have no opinion on them.

Although I have noticed its a convenent way to attack/belittle somebody without providing any reasoning or facts is to call them a fanboy.

Like I said before if you have some actual information on the subject or some real data to back up your assumption that the Audigy 2 is made up of "inferior hardware" then I would be happy to see it.

ACTUALLY REALY I WOULD LIKE TO SEE IT.

I want to know. honest. I've been looking myself.

When you said "what matters more than the sound card is an amp" I agree with that whole heartedly. The audigy with it's digital out, firewire and other happy stuff is nice. Compared to most every other sound card I've listened too the audigy one I have right now is the best I seen so far.

Actually if you want to know, I would of gotten a turtle beach card instead of the Audigy, but the drivers for Linux for the santa cruz (and the other cards based on same chipsets) just aren't all there yet.

 

[Nebor]

The Audigy has inferior hardware because it hardware upmixes all audio to 48khz. There's no way around it, even through the digital out.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nebor
The Audigy has inferior hardware because it hardware upmixes all audio to 48khz. There's no way around it, even through the digital out.

Well that makes sense.

I see that in the audigy 1 that was true, but does the audigy 2 still have that limitation?

But irregardless that is annoying since, for instance, Cdroms are recorded at ~44khz so that some weird things are bound to happen.

Is their a sound card with digital out that supports a whole range of sampling rates instead of just the 8, 11.025, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 and 96kHz that the audigy 2 supports in it's D-A and it's A-D (and it's 24bit/48khz digital out)?

 

[Brian48]

Just because it upmixes to 48hz does not mean it's inferior. 95+% of all the consumer-level sound cards on the market does this. Turtle Beach, Philips, Hercules, even the Chaintech AV-710 (as well as all current VIA Envy24HT-S) upmix to 48hz if you're using analog. The Mad Dog Entertainer 7.1 is the only one that I know of that can do 24/96 analog, but that's only through the rear speakers.

The Audigy1 is capable of 24/96 through SPDIF only.

 

[Algere]

The Revo. doesn't need to upsample(upmix).

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: Algere
The Revo. doesn't upsample.

No. Nor is it the card in contention here. Point is, just because the Audigy upsamples and the AV-710 doesn't (in digital only), doesn't make it inferior. It can alot of things the AV-710 can't.

 

[Nebor]

the av-710 can do bit perfect CD output through analog w/ an ASIO plug in, as midori detailed earlier.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nebor
the av-710 can do bit perfect CD output through analog w/ an ASIO plug in, as midori detailed earlier.

Bit perfect thru analog?

As in bit perfect you mean that all the 1's and 0's are exactly the same on both sides?

Doesn't seem to make much sense to me, since a digital signal is going to have to be translated into analog then how does it remain bit-perfect?

I realy doubt that if you play a wav thru the output of a AV-710 and then back into the input then record it into a wav file that it isn't going to remain bit for bit exactly.

Also I thought the ASIO stuff was to allow for low-latency from app to ouput, not sound quality and it doesn't seem to apply much when listening to music...


EDIT:

I get the big fasination with the av-710 now with those Headphone guys.

It's based on the EV24HT-S chipset/design....

Well there are some very high quality cards that use the EV24HT chipset/design.

The EV24ht uses some very high quality componates in it's design, and what those Headphones guys are interested in is the DAC (digital audio converters) which are suppose to be nice.

Now the EV24ht-s is a cheap knock-off for the lower-end of the consumer card market and is priced accordingly.

Well the EV24HT-S is inferior in almost everyway to the EV24HT, except for the DAC used for the lower rear channels is the same DAC that is used in the EV24HT, while the other 6 channels are feed by a cheap VIA 6 channel DAC.

So if you configure your stuff to have the analog output thru channels 7 and 8 on the Av-710 you will get the same sound as a the high end cards.

Makes sense to me.

 

[konakona]

Although I have noticed its a convenent way to attack/belittle somebody without providing any reasoning or facts is to call them a fanboy.

Alright, you have a point there, i will eat the humble pie. seems like the difference between you and me aint all that great as i thought.

but it's the condisending attitude that gets to me at times, makes me react irrationally time to time.

My thoughts exactly, I was under impression I was the one getting a lot of heat from you with reamarks like :

The other half of it is people just wanting to be snobbish and by reading some forums about people taking about how the Audigy sucks they just assume it's the gospel truth. Then that's when you hear people saying stuff like "go and get the kx drivers, they compisate for the Audigy's inferior hardware"...

Well LAUDY-F_ING-DA.

oh well, maybe i was being overly sensitive. I was only suggesting the card as it is tried and true, a proven gem i can vouch for. when i say 'inferior hardware' i only meant strictly in terms of 2channel music reproduction quality. for general public overall robustness of the package may supercede this advantage i suppose.

I have tried audigy although it wasnt on my computer, with and w/o kxdrivers. now i am using AV-710, and the reviews/comments on head-fi seem to agree with my observation. upmixing is one thing; what audiophiles (i am no audiophile, i just get ideas from them) find distasteful about audigy seems its tendency to sound 'harsh and digital'. it could be the DAC, it could be the chip - who knows. what I know is even after extesnsive amount of tweaking I simply like the sound out of my AV-710 better, which happens to be in-line with postings on head-fi. this is not a difference you would easily spot on tech spec sheets, too many intangible factors come into play.

if you get a chance, try following the link i provided and check out that ESI card. wonder if anyone is bold enough to take a plunge?

 

[apoppin]

Well, i'n no expert but i am sick to death of my onboard crap. Even moving the mouse makes some noise through my speakers.

My Philips Seismic Edge has become out of date (no driver updates for over a year) and is going in a friend's (non-gaming) rig i am building for her.

Anyway, Thief III is in stores tomorrow! . . . and i had to get 'ready' for it. . . .

So i bit the bullet and got an Audigy2 ZS ($80 at CC B&M after $20MIR).

After auditioning it, i can say i am IMPressed and am ready for T3 tomorrow (sonically, anyway - Now i gotta DO something about my Radeon 8500)

Games are damn expensive . . . $550 to upgrade my Rig to 3.31Ghz in February

- Thief III $40 + $80 soundcard . . . .

. . . next . . .

- Far Cry $40 + $90 RAM (256MB x 2-PC3500 CAS 2:3:3:7 . . . ok, that was a GREAT deal to get me 1GB ram total) . . .

and . . .

Half Life II $50 + $500 GPU (6800U)

And they call it "games"

:roll:

 

[Huma]

I've tried my fair share of soundcards, from the TB santa cruz, the revo, live and audigys, for both digital passthrough to a receiver and for headphones, and despite all the flak they get, I end up sticking with audigys. (audigy1s at home and work currently).

Despite some gripes from others, I've had no problems with the drivers at all, and can always get the audigys to play back in games, stereo, and home theatre use extremely well, but more importantly, smoothly.
With all the technical specs and graphs going around, one thing you've got to remember is that you may not be able to hear what the graphs tell you is wrong.

My friend tried both a revo and an audigy 2 with his grado sr-125s and wasn't able to discern a noticable difference in quality but the audigy "worked" better in the way of drivers and sound control UI.

I've succumbed to choosing the most hassle free reliable product I can, as long as I don't notice a quality loss.

the audigy 2 ZS is a fine card. There's nothing wrong with it at all, despite some room for improvement in a few areas.

 

[konakona]

My friend tried both a revo and an audigy 2 with his grado sr-125s and wasn't able to discern a noticable difference in quality but the audigy "worked" better in the way of drivers and sound control UI.

did your friend have a good amp driving the phones? what were the source files used fort testing? again, sound is very subjective. just as some find horizontal lines on AGs annoying while others cant stand ghosting on LCDs.

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: midori

My friend tried both a revo and an audigy 2 with his grado sr-125s and wasn't able to discern a noticable difference in quality but the audigy "worked" better in the way of drivers and sound control UI.

did your friend have a good amp driving the phones? what were the source files used fort testing? again, sound is very subjective. just as some find horizontal lines annoying while others cant stand ghosting on LCDs.

Without using ASIO or any modifications, stock installation comparing a Revo to an Audigy 2 ZS, do you think the Revo would sound signifcantly better? I mean, they're both going through kmixer... Is there really a huge difference? Assuming of course you turn off CMSS, heh.

 

[Huma]

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: midori

My friend tried both a revo and an audigy 2 with his grado sr-125s and wasn't able to discern a noticable difference in quality but the audigy "worked" better in the way of drivers and sound control UI.

did your friend have a good amp driving the phones? what were the source files used fort testing? again, sound is very subjective. just as some find horizontal lines annoying while others cant stand ghosting on LCDs.

Without using ASIO or any modifications, stock installation comparing a Revo to an Audigy 2 ZS, do you think the Revo would sound signifcantly better? I mean, they're both going through kmixer... Is there really a huge difference? Assuming of course you turn off CMSS, heh.

Thing is, without spending the time to tweak the system, the cards are hardly different. having to add a headphone amp in makes even less sense. Sound is totally subjective, which is why a revo or any other high end card might not be worth the hassle for many people. I love high quality sound. I've got sr-60s and sennheiser 497s, and paradigm studio speakers running off a denon receiver, but there are times that I'll take convenience over a barely noticable upgrade in sound.

I look for macro upgrades, ones that make me notice without having to concentrate on the sound.

If you're going to add a headphone amp into the situation, check out headphone.com's new bithead. headphone amp with a usb connection. elite!

 

[Nebor]

I also have a Denon reciever, rs85s, and HD600s. I never really use the headphones w/ the denon reciever. It's relegated to a guest bedroom w/ some mission speakers. Damn fine little system though.

I can notice a quality difference between that Denon system in the bedroom w/ mission speakers and my audigy 2 system in here w/ gigaworks speakers... But is that difference worth hundreds of dollars? No, it's just a difference. I can't really tell you if it's better or worse, just different.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: apoppin
Well, i'n no expert but i am sick to death of my onboard crap. Even moving the mouse makes some noise through my speakers.

My Philips Seismic Edge has become out of date (no driver updates for over a year) and is going in a friend's (non-gaming) rig i am building for her.

Anyway, Thief III is in stores tomorrow! . . . and i had to get 'ready' for it. . . .

So i bit the bullet and got an Audigy2 ZS ($80 at CC B&M after $20MIR).

After auditioning it, i can say i am IMPressed and am ready for T3 tomorrow (sonically, anyway - Now i gotta DO something about my Radeon 8500)

Games are damn expensive . . . $550 to upgrade my Rig to 3.31Ghz in February

- Thief III $40 + $80 soundcard . . . .

. . . next . . .

- Far Cry $40 + $90 RAM (256MB x 2-PC3500 CAS 2:3:3:7 . . . ok, that was a GREAT deal to get me 1GB ram total) . . .

and . . .

Half Life II $50 + $500 GPU (6800U)

And they call it "games"

:roll:

Just curious . . .



Is there ANY reason MP3s ripped from CD and recorded to my MD should sound CLEANER now with my Audigy2 than previously with my onboard Realtek "crap"? Is it my imagination?

Does the soundcard have any effect on this?
(I am not playing back through my computer - just recording the CD rip through NetMD burner and then noticing the MD playback through my Grado headphones seems "cleaner" [somehow].
:Q

 

[konakona]

having to add a headphone amp in makes even less sense.

to some not having a headphone amp makes even less sense

Sound is totally subjective, which is why a revo or any other high end card might not be worth the hassle for many people.

agreed, audiophiles are minority in a sense

I love high quality sound. I've got sr-60s and sennheiser 497s, and paradigm studio speakers running off a denon receiver, but there are times that I'll take convenience over a barely noticable upgrade in sound.

sr-60s are known for their ablitity to be driven at decent quality level without amplification. does that mean you can expect the same from HD580/600/650s? NO. things get only better if it is k501 or k1000 we are talking about.

I look for macro upgrades, ones that make me notice without having to concentrate on the sound.

for some, generic KDS works just fine while others may need a good AG based monitor or a LCD. not all human beings are created equal after all. i dont believe in ABX testing nor i concentrate on detecting differences on regular basis. it is a difference you can tell and FEEL immediately, to me at least.

If you're going to add a headphone amp into the situation, check out headphone.com's new bithead. headphone amp with a usb connection. elite!

i am assuming you had a sarcasm meter on with that comment

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: apoppin
Well, i'n no expert but i am sick to death of my onboard crap. Even moving the mouse makes some noise through my speakers.

My Philips Seismic Edge has become out of date (no driver updates for over a year) and is going in a friend's (non-gaming) rig i am building for her.

Anyway, Thief III is in stores tomorrow! . . . and i had to get 'ready' for it. . . .

So i bit the bullet and got an Audigy2 ZS ($80 at CC B&M after $20MIR).

After auditioning it, i can say i am IMPressed and am ready for T3 tomorrow (sonically, anyway - Now i gotta DO something about my Radeon 8500)

Games are damn expensive . . . $550 to upgrade my Rig to 3.31Ghz in February

- Thief III $40 + $80 soundcard . . . .

. . . next . . .

- Far Cry $40 + $90 RAM (256MB x 2-PC3500 CAS 2:3:3:7 . . . ok, that was a GREAT deal to get me 1GB ram total) . . .

and . . .

Half Life II $50 + $500 GPU (6800U)

And they call it "games"

:roll:

Just curious . . .



Is there ANY reason MP3s ripped from CD and recorded to my MD should sound CLEANER now with my Audigy2 than previously with my onboard Realtek "crap"? Is it my imagination?

Does the soundcard have any effect on this?
(I am not playing back through my computer - just recording the CD rip through NetMD burner and then noticing the MD playback through my Grado headphones seems "cleaner" [somehow].
:Q

You might have ripped or written at a higher bitrate than you did before. That's the only possibility, other than you being crazy.