[Steven W]

Today I purchased an old Soundesign tuner/amp and hooked it up to my PC. I realized how freaking noisy the built-in soundcard was. It uses Realtek technology. It's not terrible, but I can hear the hiss and some odd noises at various times (when a Youtube video ends, for example). I did a Google on higher end audio cards and the first result took my to this article:

http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/454839-t ... d-matters/

I was amused by the bit in the second paragraph specifically mentioning Realtek:

Anyone who has struggled with weird audio issues (mostly revolving around Realtek's audio codecs) knows what I mean.

Well, this article recommends a couple of audio cards that are somewhat expensive. I hate to say this, but how long have we been dealing with audio? How inexpensive has transistorized tech (including microchips) become? How difficult could it be to manufacture a relative inexpensive audio card with a decent signal-to-noise ratio, provide the necessary shielding to prevent noise from other PC components and provide a good driver relatively inexpensively? To me the cards mentioned in that article are a bit of overkill. I don't need a built-in amp, Dolby has always been overrated, stereo would be fine (no need for the 5.1 audio) and the signal-to-noise ratio doesn't need to be quite as high as those cards. Seriously these built-in Realtek cards suck fucking donkey balls.

[!]

So true! Same problem here. I got a built-in RealT. on my Asus board, pure crap! I haven't been arsed to buy a soundcard but I should. Back in the old days, I never went without a dedicated soundcard. Creative Soundblaster ruled. hehe

[Steven W]

I think most of the "random noise" is from the GPU. The low-level hiss when there should be silence I'm unsure about. It's not there when listening to the radio (tuner) or when I hook my portable CD player up to the amp. So, the amp's not the problem. I must admit though, I'm enjoying Slay Radio through the old amp.

I'm looking at a few USB sound cards:

This one has my attention:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6829132022

Wish it had a separate line-out instead of a combined headphone port / line out.

[MasterOne]

I'm not an audio engineer, but running the radio station and also doing studio recording on and off, I have a little bit of knowledge about sounds cards. You have to think along the lines of how much better on-board audio has become up until this point as opposed to when it first starting appearing on motherboards; that's the reason why the market for sound cards is really tiny now, meaning that on-board audio is actually quite good for most purposes. Another thing to consider is that in the end every penny matters, and if the manufacturer can skimp on EMI shielding because 99+% of their customers aren't going to hear any difference, they'll go ahead and do it to because they have to compete with the other board manufactures. I'm starting to see higher-end motherboards with EMI shielded audio codecs and built-in headphone amplifiers, but without having a board with these features I cannot comment on if it's worth paying $200 to almost $400 for a motherboard. Some motherboards now come with a plastic condom that sits over the PCB, which I think is really fucking stupid because it's going to trap heat in and shorten the life in the board, when it's marketed to do the exact opposite! So what if it protects against EMI? There are motherboards still operating today that work just fine from the 80's without the condom!

Anyhow, as far as sound cards, any aftermarket sound card from Sound Blaster, ASUS, etc., is just more junk. Yeah, it'll sound better than on-board audio, but if you're really into wanting something that's of studio quality, studios do not use any of the aforementioned. My rule of thumb is that anything with a 3.5 mm jack is going to be junk. Both channels are squeezed down to having the left and right audio channels on the same connector. That's just an audio no-no for anyone who knows two shits about audio engineering. Can you imagine the end result you'd get if a professional recording studio hooked up their mixing consoles to DSP's and Pro Tools via 3.5 mm jacks?! The people who think Sound Blaster cards are so wonderful and record their guitar licks into their PC have to remember that the ADC and DAC on a Sound Blaster card is not going to be that great, along with the overall design of the card. Something like this, below, is where we start getting into sound cards that are going to be worth the money:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=pro ... interfaces

Here's a picture of a high-end sound card made by Digigram for studio use:

VX222HR.jpg (2.06 MiB) Viewed 8385 times

You can tell just by looking at it that it's not junk, like a sound blaster card. All it takes is your eyes. So, in my opinion, the difference in audio quality between Sound Blaster and on-board sound isn't great enough to justify buying a separate sound card unless it's one designed for studio use, and they're really not that expensive. And no offense, but the USB sound card that you gave a link to with the piezoelectric speakers looks really quite sad, like it would be fun to see how fast it melts on a hot dashboard in a car.

[!]

I agree about that USB thing, no good at all. Great pointers on the Sound Blaster, thanks very much. I never thought of it that way, it's probably worth putting that extra cash into a good sound card. My current motherboard was really expensive from Asus but still, the fucking thing has a real crappy audio on it.

[Steven W]

I'm not an audiophile, the fact that I'm picking up on this stuff means that it's pretty bad. It's not loud, but it's there. I'm not looking for "studio quality", just decent, fairly clean audio. I get what you're saying about separating the audio outputs, but at the end of the day, they all share a common ground. One of the things that differentiates these older amps is how much "filtering" was done on the grounding at some point(s) electrically. Frankly, I'm not having issues with stereo separation. The Xonar U3 does not have built-in speakers and I wouldn't be using it in a car. I will admit it looks cheap and I'm looking at a few other solutions.

[MasterOne]

I agree about that USB thing, no good at all. Great pointers on the Sound Blaster, thanks very much.

Anytime. :)

I'm not an audiophile, the fact that I'm picking up on this stuff means that it's pretty bad. It's not loud, but it's there. I'm not looking for "studio quality", just decent, fairly clean audio. I get what you're saying about separating the audio outputs, but at the end of the day, they all share a common ground. One of the things that differentiates these older amps is how much "filtering" was done on the grounding at some point(s) electrically. Frankly, I'm not having issues with stereo separation. The Xonar U3 does not have built-in speakers and I wouldn't be using it in a car. I will admit it looks cheap and I'm looking at a few other solutions.

Just for the record, a lot of "audiophiles" are crazy people who think they can hear things that aren't there and who think vinyl sounds better than CD which it doesn't. If they like hearing the added surface noise that the needle picks up off the record mixed with physical unsolvable problems with records like dust, warping, and scratches, then it's all subjective, not to mention that audio recording and mastering has totally changed; most recordings today are heavily compressed. I use a Sony receiver as a headphone amp, and also have it driving some bookshelf speakers. I always liked the bass boost feature and bass and treble controls that aren't found on any of the headphone amps I've seen, and some of them get into ridiculous price ranges. The receiver is connected to my computer via a 3.5mm to RCA Y-cable. I get noise through the on-board audio too, kind of like you describe, but I haven't invested in DAC yet, and that is what I wanted to recommend to you as it's a really easy fix which totally eliminates the problem you're talking about:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Converter ... ca+optical

I'm not sure if this one is the best one to buy, but I remember wanting to get that one specific one a while back.

[Steven W]

I agree about self-described audiophiles. I agree too with you about having separate bass and treble controls. That's one of the reasons I purchased an older amp. I totally get the need to manufacture things cheaper and ending knobs (potentiometers). How many older devices do those things go bad on? I was just thinking about my car stereo, it does have separate bass and treble controls and they're digitally controlled, not potentiometer driven, the increment settings are ample to provide a reasonable degree of fine tuning.

What really bugs me about this whole sound card thing, is that this shit shouldn't even be a consideration in this day and age. Realtek has put all this effort into writing complicated drivers with retarded user interfaces, providing stupid settings (reverb, emulated surround, etc) that only a three-year old might think is cool. On a desktop computer, just make sure the output is "flat" across the range of human hearing (perhaps a bit further), interference from other components is minimized and provide a decent SNR. That's it! Frankly you'd think Intel would be embarrassed to slap their logo on this motherboard and Dell would be embarrassed to slap their logo on a case using this motherboard.

[MasterOne]

Well, for one, Windows always provided a driver for Realtek codecs so I never had to mess with installing the Realtek garbage unless I wanted to use the loopback feature (which the Windows driver didn't support). I know what you are talking about with their software mixing GUI that has silly DSP effects that are totally useless, and it's more bloat that's loading upon boot and resides in memory. It also could be a security risk. My main desktop is running on Linux, so all the audio drivers work great out of the box. Pulse, ALSA, Phonon, xine, etc, are kind of finicky because of the overly complicated Linux sound stack, especially with some applications. But it's rare these days that you'll run into issues.

I'm not sure how bad of noise you are getting from your on-board sound, but if it's faint and really only audible if your video card ramps up and/or you have the volume level on your amp cranked up, that's normal. I think on-board sound these days really is quite great for most purposes. If the noise you're getting is not the type of noise that I'm describing, you could have a grounding issue. I had this before, where an older Antec case I owned had some metal protrusions in front of the expansion slots and was contacting solder joints on the backside of motherboard. It took me a while to figure out, but I eventually took the board out and covered the protrusions up with a narrow strip of electrical tape and the problem went away.

[MasterOne]

Realtek has put all this effort into writing complicated drivers with retarded user interfaces, providing stupid settings (reverb, emulated surround, etc) that only a three-year old might think is cool.

This is one of those lowest common denominator scenarios, just like Windows 8.x. Plus, Realtek is in Taiwan. The Chinese and Taiwanese can create really tacky and cheap things just as I'm sure you know. And not only that, but hardware companies that design software usually come out with bad UI's.

An example of bad Chinese taste is the Hello Kitty Blood Donation Bus:

hellokitty.jpg (48.25 KiB) Viewed 8365 times