Help Me Help My Friend Choose A Sound Card

[GamerGuyX]

Okay here's the deal. One of my best friends of all time wants a new sound card for gaming (currently he has some generic integrated crap sound card). Right off the bat I told him get an Audigy 2 ZS of course! But he told me that he hasen't heard any good things about Creative sound cards and their drivers and whatnot. This is despite the fact that I have told him that I havent had any problems (well major problems that is) with my Audigy 2 ZS. He says he was reading that Nvidia might possibly get into the sound card market with a soundstorm based add-in card. Honestly I can't even remember if this is true (I think I remember reading something like that - I don't know). Well in the end I told him that I would go to nvnews and some of the other forums that I visit and ask to get more opinions. So I guess my question to you is: should my friend buy an Audigy 2 ZS now or wait and hope that a better sound card from another company (such as nVidia for example) will come out and buy that one? Really he just wants to know what you guys would do if you were in his situation.


Oh and BTW: We are fully aware that there is an Audigy 4, but he says its to pricey so its out of the question. :retard:

[saturnotaku]

An add-in Soundstorm card likely isn't going to happen so he shouldn't get his hopes up. Is he going to need the Firewire or any of the fancy stuff of the A2 ZS? If he just wants a solid sound card for gaming, then he can go for an Audigy 2 Value. It supports 7.1 sound and the like, but it retails for $70 (can be found online/OEM for less). I think that would be a nice, no-nonsense upgrade.

[GamerGuyX]

he just wants a solid sound card for gaming, then he can go for an Audigy 2 Value. It supports 7.1 sound and the like, but it retails for $70 (can be found online/OEM for less). I think that would be a nice, no-nonsense upgrade.

Good point. I will have to tell him that.

[Rakeesh]

It might be worth waiting about three or four months to see if anybody makes any new cards based on the HD Audio spec which was recently introduced. Currently only a few onboard sound systems support it, but it is likely that more will support it very soon.

HD Audio replaces intels aging AC97 standard that all current creative boards are based on, and it is a fully open standard so any given company can make soundboards based on it. It is also designed so that one driver can work for all HD Audio based soundcards. This is perfect if he ever wants to use linux.

You can read more about it here: http://www.intel.com/standards/hdaudio/

A non technical summary is here: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/hdaudio.htm
and here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1616358,00.asp

Microsoft has also announced that this will be part of their new UAA (Universal Audio Architecture) spec as well.

Note that some creative boards have "AdvancedHD" written on the box, but that is NOT intels spec, rather they are referring to something dealing with EAX and amature music composition.

BTW, what is the exact sound system that he has on his board? Model and everything. Often times people have pretty good onboard audio and don't even know it. Many people see "realtek" on mine and assume that it is garbage, but in my own side by side comparison it beats the crap out of the audigy 2 zs.

[|JuiceZ|]

Jen-Hsun said NVIDIA would be reintroducing the Soundstorm in a future product but, the specific details have still yet to be disclosed. There is also talk that Creative's next soundcard (after the audigy4) will actually be a brand new chip featuring some type of real-time encoding capabilities. None this has yet to be confirmed though but is highly likely since there could be some pressure from Intel's integrated HD audio tech.

Anyways, if he needs something now, he should just bite the bullet and grab the A2zs, otherwise, your friend could be in for quite a long wait looking for a better alternative for gaming from another company.

[Yonkers]

What they said, get the Audigy value.

BTW if he wont listen then don't worry about it. It isn't your problem. You are not responsible for his puter parts. ;)

[GamerGuyX]

BTW, what is the exact sound system that he has on his board?

C-Media CMI9739A

:barf:

EDIT: Nevermind I guess its pretty good.

[GamerGuyX]

Note that some creative boards have "HD Audio" written on the box, but that is NOT intels spec, rather they are referring to something dealing with EAX and amature music composing.


Your referring to EAX ADVANCED HD audio correct? My Audigy 2 ZS has that. I thought that was a good thing...

[Rakeesh]

C-Media CMI9739A

:barf:

Actually believe it or not that isn't a bad one at all. If he uses analog audio, he would have to have a pretty damn expensive sound system to notice a difference between his card and the creative card as the DAC on that one is fairly decent (albeit not *quite* as good as the audigy 2 zs.) Think of it like overclocking a CPU from say 3ghz to 3.1ghz. Theres really not much of a difference. The S/N ratio on that chipsets DAC is 90 vs creatives 108.

If he uses digital audio then he is going to get better sound quality than the creative board hands down. I think that one can do live dolby digital encoding which would be a huge advantage in terms of convenience, and if his sound system is decent, quality as well.

That sound system also supports EAX 2.0 and DS3D, and no games currently available will use anything greater than that. If he is looking for speed improvements in games, I also doubt there would be any noticeable improvement in that area as well.

Only the audigy 2 zs would be an improvement at all (I haven't examined their lower end cards but I imagine they would actually be worse than what he has,) no other creative board will outdo what he has (excepting possibly the audigy 4.) I would keep what he has if I were him, the money he spends wont give him any worthwhile improvement.

[GamerGuyX]

Actually believe it or not that isn't a bad one at all. If he uses analog audio, he would have to have a pretty damn expensive sound system to notice a difference between his card and the creative card as the DAC on that one is fairly decent (albeit not *quite* as good as the audigy 2 zs.) Think of it like overclocking a CPU from say 3ghz to 3.1ghz. Theres really not much of a difference. The S/N ratio on that chipsets DAC is 90 vs creatives 108.

If he uses digital audio then he is going to get better sound quality than the creative board hands down. I think that one can do live dolby digital encoding which would be a huge advantage in terms of convenience, and if his sound system is decent, quality as well.

That sound system also supports EAX 2.0 and DS3D, and no games currently available will use anything greater than that. If I were him I would keep what he has, the money he spends wont give him any worthwhile improvement.

Well one reason he didn't wan't to keep using his onboard audio was because of the performance hit of such a solution. Even if it is small... maybe he won't care I don't know...

[GamerGuyX]

BTW if he wont listen then don't worry about it. It isn't your problem. You are not responsible for his puter parts. ;)

Well its really not like he is arguing with me or anything like that. He's just...concerned.

[Rakeesh]

Your referring to EAX ADVANCED HD audio correct? My Audigy 2 ZS has that. I thought that was a good thing...

I am not exactly certain what it is, all I know is that it isn't what I am referring to in my above post (the new audio standard from intel.) If I understand correctly, it is an extension to the eax api which adds yet more reverb and positional effects for games and whatnot, but I haven't heard of it being anything phenominal. IIRC there aren't any games that use eax beyond the 2.0 spec. Audio API's aren't really my thing so I haven't done much research on them.

If it is what I understand it to be, then only amature musicians or effects artists will benefit from it, and nobody else. (A professional would probably go with a much more expensive sound board from somebody like m-audio, and then use some fancy $400 effects software)

[Rakeesh]

Well one reason he didn't wan't to keep using his onboard audio was because of the performance hit of such a solution. Even if it is small... maybe he won't care I don't know...

Here is what I would do, if I were him I would head to best buy or compusa or some place that offers a 14-day or greater return period. Try out an audigy 2 zs and see if it makes any difference. If not just return it to the store and get a full refund. If it does make a difference just keep it.

I wouldn't know since I don't own the sound system he is using, but I don't anticipate there being much of a difference.

[saturnotaku]

CMI-based solutions aren't bad at all, better than anything Realtek or VIA offers IMO. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is a CMI audio card, and that's one of the best ones I've ever used, second only to my Audigy 2 ZS in terms of overall satisfaction.

[ynnek]

I'd spend the money on better speakers first.


One thing that bugs me is most Audigy 2's don't really have a standard optical SPDIF out port on them.. what I've read is you have to deal with some wierd coverter, which doesn't exactly work right...

[GamerGuyX]

I'd spend the money on better speakers first.


He has some pretty good Klipsch 5.1 speakers.

[GamerGuyX]

Here is what I would do, if I were him I would head to best buy or compusa or some place that offers a 14-day or greater return period. Try out an audigy 2 zs and see if it makes any difference. If not just return it to the store and get a full refund. If it does make a difference just keep it.

That or I could just lend him mine.

[Rakeesh]

Just FWIW, the way that most marketers advertise DAC's (Digital to Analog Converter, for outputting sound to an analog speaker) or ADC's (Analog to Digital Converter, for recording audio) they'll usually include only three important factors:

Sound to Noise ratio (also seen as s/n.) Basically think of it like how good or bad the audio artefacting is when the sound is converted digital<--->analog, comparable to when you compress an image file in a lossy format and you see the little distortions in the picture resulting from the imperfections.

This is usually what makes the difference between a good or bad soundcard if you use analog speakers. By todays standards, anything above 100dB is pretty good, although this can vary depending on what length of the audio spectrum and amplitude they are talking about. The cheaper your speakers the less of a difference it makes. I think most spec sheets usually refer to the 20-20K Hz range when the volume in the windows mixer is set to its highest setting.

It can get more distorted when you lower the volume on any card, and for this reason if you want the maximum audio quality on any card, including creative cards, it is best if you always set your "master volume" and "wave out" sliders to the very maximum (these might have different names depending on your driver, but they do the same thing.) You should adjust the volume with the controls on your speakers instead. Naturally this doesn't apply if you use a digital audio port, except on creative cards (the reason for this actually has to do with the same reason why creative boards are notoriously bad with digital audio.)

Also the s/n ratio doesn't make any difference if you use a digital sound setup. In this case your speakers will include their own built in DAC, thus when you buy digital speakers make sure they have a decent quality DAC.

PCM sampling rate. This is how many audio samples can can be generated for every second of audio. Think of it like changing the resolution of the audio, the higher the sampling rate the better the quality. Modern DAC's will support up to 192Khz.

Bit rate. The larger the bit rate means that there can be more levels of loudness and quietness per sample in the PCM signal. 16-bit can have 2^16 (65535) different levels, 24-bit can have 2^24 (16.7 million,) etc. This is about comparable to the difference between 16-bit video and 32-bit video.

Even cheap (less than $80) soundcards these days can do 192Khz sampling rate at 24-bits per sample, so if you are buying a new card theres no reason to not look for that in a DAC. Games don't really take advantage of that though, most games only sample audio at 48Khz with 16-bits per sample. DVD's do the full 192/24 as far as I am aware.

Also if your soundcard includes a digital port, make sure that is also capable of sending PCM data at 192/24 (I am not sure but I think some cards actually can't do this.)

So far as the other features go, I wouldn't worry of whether or not it can decode DTS or dolby digital since most software DVD players do this for you (and dvd playback is the only time you'd ever need these.) So far as API's, I would only really worry about EAX 2 and DS3D, maybe A3D as well if you play older games. I haven't seen any games that use EAX 3 or higher, though I guess there could be a few, somebody tell me if I am wrong here.

[Rakeesh]

I'd spend the money on better speakers first.


One thing that bugs me is most Audigy 2's don't really have a standard optical SPDIF out port on them.. what I've read is you have to deal with some wierd coverter, which doesn't exactly work right...

Actually optical is worse than coax in the case of digital audio believe it or not. I know it may sound odd being that one is using fiber optics and one is over a coaxial cable, and being digital you'd otherwise think that you either get the entire signal or no signal, that just isn't the case here.

Both optical and coaxial send the same data over the wire, only one actually converts the PCM signal into light pulses and then back into electrical pulses while the other doesn't convert the signal at all, rather it just stays in the form of electrical pulses. Optical is also called "toslink" or "toshiba link" and it was originally developed for older toshiba laptops to be able to transfer data from one another. The sad thing is toslink is only capable of 4mbit/s whereas the plain coaxial wire can do 10mbit/s.

Now since the audio going over these wires doesn't exceed (I think, I could be wrong) 2mbit/s, that doesn't make much of a difference. However, the process of converting the signal from electrical to light pulses causes some loss in the PCM signal, which tends to add audio jitter (tiny gaps in the bitstream as your ocassional audio sample gets lost or just plain comes out wrong.) That basically makes your highs not so high and your lows not so low.

This might not make any difference if you are just playing a DVD or playing a game with DDE (dolby digital encoding) hardware which just feeds a pure AC3 signal which I think doesn't get affected by any data loss like raw PCM does (although I could be wrong.) But then again AC3 itself is lossy, though I myself can't tell much of a difference between it and regular PCM. Although the good thing about AC3 is that you can carry even more audio data over the same signal than you can with uncompressed PCM, so if I were to guess I would say it is possible for AC3 to sound better than PCM.

Creative cards in particular use coaxial and not optical, however they don't do it using a standard RCA connector. Instead they do it using a 1/4" minijack, which isn't compatible with any normal speaker setup that supports coaxial digital audio. So you have to fix this by going to radio shack and buying a little peice that converts from a 1/4" minijack to an RCA female end. This costs like $3 or something - its cheap and therefore not too big of a problem, although it is quite an annoying inconvenience.

That said, this isn't why creative boards are bad with digital audio though. I am not 100% certain of the exact reason why, but with my own experience I think it is because they add a soft mixer over the PCM audio. Why they do this? I really don't know, but it results in a lossy signal and it is just plain ugly compared to even generic soundcards that do digital audio. The worst part is that they made the digital audio sound worse than the analog audio on their cards. They might do this so that you can use the built in volume controls and mixers that come with their drivers, but theres really no need for that since most speakers capable of digital audio include their own which are usually much much better.

[ynnek]

yes, thats what the coaxial guys say..

but coaxial is also prone to interference, and probably needs its own conversions too to boost the signal across the cable..

In the end, I don't really think it makes a difference.

[Rakeesh]

yes, thats what the coaxial guys say..

but coaxial is also prone to interference, and probably needs its own conversions too to boost the signal across the cable..

In the end, I don't really think it makes a difference.

Coaxial will always provide a solid signal if you use a decent composite cable and stay under 6 feet in length. (lest of course your amp is located far away from your PC or your TV :D) Then again it is also not a good idea to go over that length with any solution as you are just adding that much more latency (and some HT setups already have sync problems as it is.)

[SH64]

I think the ZS is the way to go .. its not the best out there , but it should do just fine for the time being .