integrated sound vs discrette

[anb]

It'd be like buying studio-grade headphones and then plugging them into onboard sound :P

So like, what, does it makes THAT kind of difference? i remember going from old integrated AC97 to realtek HD audio - it was a huge step in quality of sound. But for the past few years i can't say there was any serious increase, my Asus Maximus 4 sounds pretty good to me. Though i am not using any kind of expensive headphones (20$ Koss UR-20 and 60$ Edifier R1600T Plus speakers). Both in my opinion sound good enough.

Is there so big difference in quality beetween this and, lest say Asus Xonar and some 150$ headphones?

[Deleted]

There's a difference in quality, but topline soundcards cost like £150 (~$230 off the top of my head?) and you definitely do not see a difference that is worth £150.

[Isendar]

This might have been true a few years ago (Win XP days). Integrated sound cards have gotten much better and are capable of so much more (i.e. S/PDIF, 8.1 surround, Dolby DTS, and acoustical effects). Dedicated or as you call them discrete sound cards take the load off the CPU but with todays quad, six, and even eight core CPUs, the load is negligible. There might be a few effects that are better. Heck maybe even the sound channels might be a bit higher. But in all honesty, unless your a true audiophile, anal about sound and can tell a difference between $100 headphones and over $300 ones, or you just want some cool hardware to fill your PCI-E/PCI slot that sits there gathering dust, I wouldn't be too concerned.

I'm about to connect my Creative 5.1 speaker system to a Realtek on-board sound card from my motherboard. When I only used two speakers, I noticed no difference between the Sound Blaster Audigy ZS (Paid $99 about 8 years ago) and the on-board. I take that back, the on-board sounded better since it was alot newer. So unless you got money to burn and a slot you've been itchin to fill, building for a sound technician, musician, or studio, or you just got a pair of insane discriminating ears, stick with the on-board!

[FlawlessSoul]

If you're going to drop extra money on high-end speakers or headphones, then yes it is worth the extra to get a decent soundcard. Onboard sound has come a LONG way in the past five years, even the standard chipsets can provide adequate sound for most users.

For those that truly need extra audio clarity for working with audio, need extra inputs/outputs, or have speakers/headphones that really will make a difference with a better soundcard, there are a number of options:

Asus Xonar D2X
Auzentech X-Meridian
Auzentech X-Fi (Uses the Creative X-Fi chip, but engineered by Auzentech)
ESI Juli@
HT Omega Claro

And a lot more.

[BicycleMafioso]

Depends.
Do you have a crap-quality sound-system/headphones (ie, anything from Logitech, Steelseries, Corsair or especially Razer)?
Upgrade your sound.

Do you have good-quality sound-system already? An inexpensive sound card will be an upgrade. An expensive soundcard will rarely be a huge enough upgrade from an inexpensive one, but as long as you have a good quality sound card, you're usually good to go.
Spending money on a sound card will give you noticably better sound. But you should always spend the big big majority of your money on the soundsystem rather than the soundcard.

On-board isn't awful, but comparably, it's horrible. Really.

[Asera]

I can tell the difference between my onboard and SB X-Fi using my good headphones.

I cannot tell the difference at all when using my cheap $25 Sony headphones I use out of the house.

So yeah, the sound system itself matters more than the card, although I will say they 'scale' with each other in terms of quality.

[Deleted]

I'd agree with the general consent here that modern onboard sound is good enough in most cases. It's just not excellent.

If you're going to invest money into better sound, you should assign about 75% of your budget to improving your headphones, and assign the remaining 25% to getting a better sound-card. However this logic only really applies beyond 100 dollar.

[Deleted]

I bought the Asus Xonar PCI-Express soundcard, and it wasn't until I spent a few extra euro and bought a pair of fatality headset that it actually made a difference.

[DeltrusDisc]

There's a difference in quality, but topline soundcards cost like £150 (~$230 off the top of my head?) and you definitely do not see a difference that is worth £150.

Might not be worth it to you... but some people care how their music/audio sounds.

[Deleted]

Might not be worth it to you... but some people care how their music/audio sounds.

I care about how my music sounds, but I seriously do not think the difference is worth the amount of money you put in. Sure if money is no object then go ahead, but for 95% of people, it is.

[anb]

I bought the Asus Xonar PCI-Express soundcard, and it wasn't until I spent a few extra euro and bought a pair of fatality headset that it actually made a difference.

did you actually compared your fatality headset on integrated sound vs Xonar?
Because i am pretty much sure if i upgrade my UR-20 to something a lot more expensive i'll still hear the difference without changing soundcard.

[Deleted]

I sure did, that was the first thing I did when I bought the headphones. Understandably i'm not the biggest audiophile so for me it was same o'l same o'l

[DeltrusDisc]

I care about how my music sounds, but I seriously do not think the difference is worth the amount of money you put in. Sure if money is no object then go ahead, but for 95% of people, it is.

Money is an object, that's why you "save for that big purchase you want to make, that special toy you want so so badly." <-- You do that so that you don't feel like you've just made a foolish mistake/spent all of your money. The saving process not only allows you to have the money for things you need, but it also forces more time spent thinking and making sure you truly want to make the purchase.

---------- Post added 2011-10-18 at 04:54 PM ----------

did you actually compared your fatality headset on integrated sound vs Xonar?
Because i am pretty much sure if i upgrade my UR-20 to something a lot more expensive i'll still hear the difference without changing soundcard.

A sound card is like a video card, it's something dedicated to making audio/video better, crisper, clearer, more fluent. I remember I used to think video/images looked fine on my old Gateway before I got an integrated graphics card, I thought it would only make games better. Holy shit I was wrong! Not only was the screen crisper and giving much stronger colors, images looked better, video footage looked better, everything just looked far more amazing.

In terms of audio, you need to understand also, you'll notice a much bigger difference and improvement if you actually use .wav files.... but not with some $50 headphones. You need the big guns, and a sound card will only handle them even better. .mp3, .mp4 files etc are shit in comparison. .wav is uncompressed, I realized a .wav is about 10x as large on the hdd, that extra space is the parts of music you'll only hear with a truly amazing audio setup.

[Deleted]

Your graphics card is not going to make the colours look better or the screen crisper (Unless you perhaps upgrade from a card that uses VGA to one that supports DVI or an equivalent digital connection). Also you use a bit of a oxymoron with a "integrated graphics card", I assume you mean a dedicated graphics card but the integrated implies that it is actual something like onboard graphics on your mobo.

Furthermore, you mention about .wav files. Firstly, I'd strongly recommend you don't use .wav files unless you especially like using excessive amounts of hard drive space. A much more sutible solution would be to use something like FLAC which provides the lossless nature of .wav but compresses the data so it does not use so much hard drive space (On average you'd be looking at around a 50% reduction.) Secondly, whilst I still recommend the use of lossless files anyway, it is debatable that there is that much different between lossless formats and lossy formats like mp3, especially at higher bit rates and most certainly not as much as you claim.

In terms of upgrading from onboard to a dedicated sound card, I'd strongly recommend it. I purchased a pair of Grado SR80i headphones which I connected to my onboard sound and whilst I could notice a improvement over my much cheaper sound headphones I still noticed a bit of distortion in the sound which I was disappointed with. However after purchasing my Xonar Essence STX the difference between the onboard sound and the dedicated sound card was clear. Gone were the sound distortions and the overall "feel" of the music was much more crisp.

Money is an object, that's why you "save for that big purchase you want to make, that special toy you want so so badly." <-- You do that so that you don't feel like you've just made a foolish mistake/spent all of your money. The saving process not only allows you to have the money for things you need, but it also forces more time spent thinking and making sure you truly want to make the purchase.

---------- Post added 2011-10-18 at 04:54 PM ----------



A sound card is like a video card, it's something dedicated to making audio/video better, crisper, clearer, more fluent. I remember I used to think video/images looked fine on my old Gateway before I got an integrated graphics card, I thought it would only make games better. Holy shit I was wrong! Not only was the screen crisper and giving much stronger colors, images looked better, video footage looked better, everything just looked far more amazing.

In terms of audio, you need to understand also, you'll notice a much bigger difference and improvement if you actually use .wav files.... but not with some $50 headphones. You need the big guns, and a sound card will only handle them even better. .mp3, .mp4 files etc are shit in comparison. .wav is uncompressed, I realized a .wav is about 10x as large on the hdd, that extra space is the parts of music you'll only hear with a truly amazing audio setup.

[Asera]

You have to be a very serious audiophile to complain about the minuscule difference between FLAC and a 320kbps MP3.

[DeltrusDisc]

Your graphics card is not going to make the colours look better or the screen crisper (Unless you perhaps upgrade from a card that uses VGA to one that supports DVI or an equivalent digital connection). Also you use a bit of a oxymoron with a "integrated graphics card", I assume you mean a dedicated graphics card but the integrated implies that it is actual something like onboard graphics on your mobo.

So perhaps I did kind of state my thing poorly, I was typing a little quick perhaps, Idk. I was upgrading from an integrated graphics chip on my motherboard to an actual graphics card. VGA -> DVI.

[Sephiracle]

Might not be worth it to you... but some people care how their music/audio sounds.

Sound is a lot less tangible than Visuals though which makes it difficult to convince people apart from audiophiles to purchase or upgrade their equipment. The onboard sound works well for me, would it be better with a discrete card? Probably, but not something I see myself spending much on compared to other and much more important hardware upgrades.

[DeltrusDisc]

Sound is a lot less tangible than Visuals though which makes it difficult to convince people apart from audiophiles to purchase or upgrade their equipment. The onboard sound works well for me, would it be better with a discrete card? Probably, but not something I see myself spending much on compared to other and much more important hardware upgrades.

I completely understand this, hell, I'm still using a Gamecom 377 headset with onboard RealTek HD Audio and then I have a Logitech Z2300 speaker system with an old Sony stereo system of 2 satellites plugged in to give some wider audio range. It all sounds pretty decent, but being a drummer and having been around plenty of high quality speakers and hearing, oh say, Adam Audio/M-Audio speakers at Sam Ash, I'm sold that my setup/headphones is quite average, at best.

[Nellah]

Your graphics card is not going to make the colours look better or the screen crisper (Unless you perhaps upgrade from a card that uses VGA to one that supports DVI or an equivalent digital connection).

Then you obviously weren't into games around the GeForce3 days. Moving from a Voodoo3 3000 / GeForce2 MX200 to a GeForce4 Ti4200 was a huge increase in 2D image quality (brightness, sharpness, overall readability) - on the same 17" CRT monitor. Modern GPUs all have achieved a baseline for 2D image quality, I can't tell the difference between my 8400GS and my HD 6950, but back in the day there actually was a huge huge difference.

[Deleted]

Yeah, don't worry about it, that what I suspected was the case anyway ^^

So perhaps I did kind of state my thing poorly, I was typing a little quick perhaps, Idk. I was upgrading from an integrated graphics chip on my motherboard to an actual graphics card. VGA -> DVI.

Yes but hardware from over 12 years ago is hardly relevant. I doubt someone is going to be reading this thread with a Voodoo3 3000 and is about to go out and buy a GeForce 4 series, hence why I did not feel it relevant to mention. A lot of things might be relevant "back in the day" but to mention them in every thread would be a waste of time and may confuse some people who perhaps might not know, in this example, what a Voodoo3 3000 card is.

Then you obviously weren't into games around the GeForce3 days. Moving from a Voodoo3 3000 / GeForce2 MX200 to a GeForce4 Ti4200 was a huge increase in 2D image quality (brightness, sharpness, overall readability) - on the same 17" CRT monitor. Modern GPUs all have achieved a baseline for 2D image quality, I can't tell the difference between my 8400GS and my HD 6950, but back in the day there actually was a huge huge difference.