What Does It Take To Turn The PC Into A Hi-Fi Audio Platform?

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Excellent and thorough review, which in itself is very, very commendable. Your preliminary conclusions was for pop music and for the headphones out. Remeber sound quality is dependent on the recording! Consider redoing the test with ACOUSTIC classical music for reviewed high resolution recordings including violins, recorded live in a concert hall. It'll be a lot of work, but it'll probably (at least in my experience) more revealing of any differences.
 
My five-year Gigabyte old motherboard (well, nearly six) has the ALC889a. I'm presuming this is merely a Gigabyte designation of the ALC889, in which case it's been around in some form or another for six or seven years.
 
VERY nice Toms. I'm very impressed by the testing you guys did.I knew the ALC892 is inferior to the 889, but I never imagined the 1150 was just a minor upgrade over the 889. What about the VIA sound cards around? I know they're few, but I think they're very good as well (integrated as the Realtek ones are).Can you guys add another contender (in my opinion) to the match, please? The Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB. It's not that expensive and they are great (for me, at least). Another great contender is the Fiio E10.Cheers!
 
@dogman-XI run my headphones and speakers through a receiver via optical as well. The thing is that older receivers generally use the same DAC and amplifiers as newer ones, but because they are missing things like HDMI or 4K passthrough they prices just drop through the floor. If all you need is an optical input or two then you can get a very high quality receiver for $1-200 and power a whole bunch of nice equipment with it.There is truly no need for a sound card anymore, that much has been known for a while. What I learned from this article is that you don't really need a dedicated DAC/amp for headphones either anymore (except maybe for 600ohm cans). But you still need a decent DAC/amp for speakers... you just don't need to pay an arm and a leg for them.
 
Nice idea, nice review and a bold conclusion. Which I´m afraid are closer to the truth, that many would like to admit.There are a few concerns in my opinion though.One concern is that you´re using headphones. Any headphone, no matter price, are totally useless for objective listening. I´ve been in the music business for more than 40 years now, as an artist, a sidekick and engineer, and the only thing we use our phones for, are monitoring while recording with microphones or checking the effects levels. So I´d suggest you use a pair of proffessional, powered studiomonitors, preferebly nearfield-monitors, as they are painstakingly linear and revealing, Genelecs of a certain size would be a good place to start.The second concern are the choice of music.Music producers are fighting for our attention, and as we have a 0 dB standard, they can´t use volume as a parameter. Noticed how people insist, that the commercials on TV are louder than the shows? It´s not possible because of the 0 dB standard, but it actually sound louder.It´s because the producer of the commercial soundtrack are using a compressor to bring every last bit of sound up-front, directed towards you with the utmost impact. The same goes for music.You have to go to the studio pro´s and ask them, what records are known NOT to be so overly compressed. Daniel Lanois´ records - for instance Bob Dylans "Time Out Of Mind" - or Donald Fagen´s records are some, there are tons of others.Lastly, I suggest you use musicians as listeners, we know how to listen for differences and are very consious about what to listen for. Not to suggest, that the listeners you usedare not competent, they love music and listening and good sound as much as I/we do, but we spend years and years in a proffessional environment, listening and listening til our ears falls of, for the slightest differencies, trained by other pro´s who have already spent a lifetime doing just that.In the end I can´t help feeling, that bringing an ordinary PC up to hi-fi standards - which is very old - is a pretty easy and quite cheap job on the LISTENING side of things, (recording is a whole different story), as your article also states.But making it a high-end piece of audiophile equipment still would take more than the tech of today are able to.
 
I agree with one of the above comments. Creative Titanium HD would definitely make a welcome addition in this test, since it's widely considered the best PC sound card out there.On another note, what do you think about AV receivers that support FLAC playback, as that could potentially completely replace the need for PC sound processing (via HDMI bitstreaming like with DTS and Dolby audio)?

Also, no offence to your quality headphones, but they can't possible compare to the sound immersiveness produced by a high-end speaker system like PSB or SVS Ultra. Comparing devices on such system would definitely yield much more telling results.
 
I've come to consider myself an audiophile, hell, i was raised by an audiophile... it's in the blood i guess. I always thought my ears were bad, cause i couldn't tell the difference between a mid ranged sound system and a high one. I COULD tell the difference between good and bad speakers, but almost never could tell any difference between the sound systems themselves. I was always puzzled by this, until a series of recent articles i've stumbled upon in the last 6 months. Most were at low trafic sites (notably tekreport), but they had been pointing out past 44hz/16bit it was pretty hard for the human ear to hear much of anything. Glad Tom's is backing these assertions up, it makes a lot of sense to me, as it seems to back up my own experience. Great article. Bravo.Now we need some objective measurements of speakers and headphone quality. (not that i'd ever use headphones)
 
Technically this is a good review and, in most aspects, audio professionals would agree with it. But ...As a professional clarinetist and audio engineer, I know that acoustic instrument recordings (classical and jazz) are the areas that we must stress and nitpick to learn what equipment truly excels. Why? It places the greatest demands on fidelity.Sure, most people listen to rock, hip hop, rap, and whatever so somebody might argue that acoustic music is irrelevant. Well, to him it is. But an accurate equipment review must give much more weight to acoustic instruments to be truly valid.Frankly, I am pretty happy that, given the material used for testing, this review came to pretty decent conclusions.
 
No Freakin Way. Hearing is more about sound wavs, there is a lot more going on there than just that. Its like comparing a tube amplifier to a solid state one vs none. Its subjective based on the ears of the listener. Likewise its well known that women's hearing does not have the ability to distinguish depth as males.
 
Another way of getting HI-FI audio from your PC is to use a home theater receiver that is capable of processing HDMI audio. If HDMI audio out is supported on your PC, hook up your PC to the receiver and let the receiver render the audio. In many cases, the receiver is likely to have significantly better audio render hardware.
 
Personally, I guess that 44.1 is probably pushing on the low end a bit and it would have been slightly better if music was at 48 kHz, but it isn't.I do think that 24 bit depth is good for playback, volume, internal mixing, other processing in many cases.
 
Nice article! I have a passing interest in this kind of testing. It was especially interesting since I have the Asus Xonar STX. I bought it because of the available outputs and since my onboard audio was a lower end chipset. While I'm not an audiophile, I more disagree more than I agree regarding the need to test using loudspeakers. A good set of cans ("headphones") should be able to produce sound that is exceptional, including lower sub frequencies and stereo separation. Floor standing, full range speakers are much more open to interpretation than headphones with a single driver. Driver selection, speaker design, crossover design...just a few factors that play a critical role in how those particular speakers will reproduce sound. However, that being said, since you are only testing source, then the choice of speaker isn't as critical, all things being equal after the signal leaves the source.My biggest contention is what you did note in the article, and that being able to do a live switch between sources. As you noted, our ability to recall audible memories is much more difficult that being able to live-switch between multiple sources. Was there any reason you could simply wire up an A-B-C-D switchbox to instantly click between source inputs? Or, rather than listen to full pieces of music, you listen to quick, repeated snippets. This helps 'burn the image' into our mind for later recollection and gives us something smaller to focus on.Unless I missed it, an important part of the test should be the source's ability to handle silence and attenuation. This is particularly important in recordings of orchestral music. Among my audio test CD's, I have a particular fondness of Gustav Holst's "The Planets". There is a LOT of depth in those recordings, especially towards the end of each song.
 
*facepalm*Inexcusably, this has to be one of the poorest (if not THE poorest) article I have ever read on Tom's Hardware. I applaud Filippo (the author)'s effort in putting the tests together, and I appreciate his open admission that he is not an audio enthusiast in any way. But to dismiss the medium and high end audio gear as little better than the $2 onboard stuff is just absurd. In some ways, it is akin to having grandma saying how her base model Corolla is no different than Porsche 911 since she drives them to the supermarket just the same.As a head-fi enthusiast myself, I can 100% assure you that are magnitudes of difference between your onboard sound card and what $2000 can buy. As a matter of fact, even at the $2, $200, $500, $800 price points, the difference in audio quality is *HUGE*.For anyone who is seriously interested in quality head-fi audio, instead of wasting your time reading through this particular article (and worse, be swayed by its conclusion in any form or way), please do yourself a favour and head over to http://www.head-fi.org/. The community there is friendly and helpful, and will offer you real, useful, and quality insights to help you get the most out of your audio $$$.Head-Fi doesn't have to be expensive to sound good -- you just have to know how to spend your dollars.
 
Someone mentioned drivers. These could be doing some internal processing that one might not be aware of such as anti-click, anti-clip, volume leveling, resampling or even equalization.
 
There's a lot of things to mention on here, but the main is that there is no attempt to isolate any aspect of performance with a device. The main thing you are testing here is how well does the headphone amplifier section of a specific device perform with the pair of headphones you have on hand. You'd need an external amp that could be adjusted for each device to actually test the audio circuitry and not the headphone amplifier section.There's also a lot of terminology that is off. "and advanced lossless compression schemes like FLAC, ALAC, and AIFF, the latter of which can halve the size of an audio file with no quality loss whatsoever." AIFF is raw, uncompressed PCM. The other two can reduce the file size in half with no loss in quality, AIFF is just PCM with metadata.Also, DVD-Audio is a media format, not a file format. It it high-resolution PCM using Meridian Lossless Packing. Files from HD Tracks are available as WAV, AIFF, ALAC and FLAC but not MLP. High-resolution PCM would be the correct term for it as well.You're also assuming that every single vendor has totally accurate specs on their products, and that they all measure them the same way. Looking at them now I can see some are using different measurements for the same value, and some aren't specifying how they got to a certain measurement. I don't think if we saw a monitor that promised "10,000,000:1 Contrast Ratio" we'd say "It's on the specs page, so just look there" instead of measuring it.It seems that everything is left to subjective music memory with no objective measures done, and only subjective testing that is introducing too many variables. There's too many unknowns for me to really pull any actual conclusions out of here except "With my headphones, I couldn't remember hearing a difference"
 
Back in the 70's (and long before, I'm sure) the advice given to budding audiophiles was "buy the best speakers you can afford that sound pleasing to you". That advice still stands. Another point made in this article is that medium isn't as important as how the source was put on it. A crappy recording of a piece of music will sound terrible whether or not it is presented in the worst MP3 compression format or presented losslessly. How it is recorded and mixed plays a huge role in how it sounds, and if tracks are only used for conveniently laying down different parts of the sound it will sound like mush. You can't get the benefits of stereo separation if it is ignored in the recording process.Back in the 70s I had no trouble telling the difference between amps, preamps, receivers, when all else was as equal as could be made. So, as solid as this set of tests appears to be, I have to remain skeptical. Has sound technology come to the point where every part between source and speakers can be reduced down to a $2 chip? Maybe that's the case, but it was emphatically not true 40 years ago, and people were telling us "you can't tell the difference" back then, too.Regardless, it bears repeating; I don't think this can be said too often:If you want to improve your listening experience, buy better speakers. Many of us with lower budgets turn to headphones because you can get good quality for just a couple of hundred dollars (and you can get decent for less than that). Anything else - buy it, try it, make an objective decision, and return it if it doesn't give you a better experience. Be as impartial as you can, but - don't let anyone dictate to you what you can or can't hear.
 


Just curious: Are you refuting my comment? If so, I agree with what you just wrote so maybe you misunderstood what I meant. I think our opinions are about the same.
 
On the technical side, 44.1kHz vs 48kHz is a major consideration: many cheap devices will resample 44.1kHz (badly) to 48kHz before the DAC. Also, while it is true that 44.1kHz has a Nyquist frequency of 22.05kHz, you would need _perfect_ Fourier interpolation to get that, which I doubt anything does. If you look at Computational Aero Acoustics (CAA) simulations of sound, you'll find they typically use 6 or more "points per wavelengths", while the Nyquist frequency corresponds to 2 points per wavelength. Using that standard, 120kHz sampling would be needed for 20kHz sound reproduction.

Not that any of this changes your conclusion; I'm quite willing to believe there's no audible difference between the three or four you tested. Thanks for the great article.
 
I used to see home audio and I can tell you that the speakers are 90% of the quality. So as long as your setup can properly drive the speakers you are using anything more will not make much of a difference. That leads to the problem with this test....driving a set of headphones is in no way the same as driving a huge set of floor speakers. I would like them to repeat this test using 3 or more different sets or speakers with each different item tested. I could be wrong but I am willing to bet you would tell the difference between these items if you were using then to play music through a $20000 set of speakers.
 
Wow. Just wow. Filippo, you have opened a can of worms with this review...As an audio professional, in the industry over 25 years, I mostly agree with your conclusions and have for 15 years. This topic is anything but new. I realize that you wanted to prove/disprove some of the audiophile myths that circulate; hence, the subjective experiment. What you evaluated was the equipment's ability to reproduce/recreate. Your results are not surprising, however, as these issues can and have been measured objectively. What can't be measured is a system's ability to image. As gaymer1984 pointed out, the real challenge is recreating the soundscape accurately, placing the original sources (musicians/instruments) in a 3D aural environment as if we were experiencing it live...My advice I started giving 15 years ago is very simple:Start with clean, high resolution files.Get your DA/AD out of the EMI ridden environment of the computer. How you get the 1's and 0's to the DA is much less important. (PCIe, USB, Firewire, HDMI, Optical, etc.)Use balanced audio connections where appropriate.Buy equipment that sounds good to you! (Just because we're supposed to the like the food better at a four-star restaurant doesn't mean we won't prefer the the one-star joint. It's the entire experience.)The above equipment should be appropriate for your listening environment.Set your system up correctly. Use a reference mic and real-time analyzer to correct for shortcomings in your speakers or environment.After a certain point, there is exponentially fewer returns on each dollar spent. I'll match my approximately $2000 media center against anything and be very happy with the results.12,000+ words on the differing quality of DAs seems to me of little value. There are far more variables after the DA that effect what we hear. For instance, I only use cans when I'm working or listening in public. That changes things a lot. Our listening environment is far more crucial than DA performance. Take 70 MPH on the highway for example.Most of this discussion is moot for several reasons. A few being:A far majority of music consumers are listening to 128 kbps files on cheap, bundled earbuds; or, worse yet, on the built-in speakers of our gadgets.Few people know how to listen anymore. Maybe we should start by talking about what we're listening to/for. It's one thing to listen but far different to appreciate.SPL levels that make my ears bleed or bass that makes me feel like I'm on a respirator are rarely appropriate.Perhaps, I get very frustrated with these discussions, as I tend to hear far more noise than signal.Just my two cents.
 
There's Life Above 20 Kilohertz! A Survey of Musical Instrument Spectra to 102.4 KHzhttp://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htmWhereas humans cannot detect pure tones above a certain frequency, the question I have is whether or not humans can discern the shape of waveforms that some would say includes high frequency components.Nyqist says something along the following, if you don't have any frequencies above a certain threshold or you first modify the signal so it does not, then you can ....
 
I feel the review is relatively incomplete, as is. Headphones are fine, but if you want to see if these different solutions TRULY are different or not, you should be using high-quality speakers. This is from someone who went from PC soundcards/speakers to a nice receiver/entry-level component 5.1 speakers, and then to a pre-post mid-range (audiophile) setup. A good pre-post will have 1-2k in the pre, 1-2k+ for amp, and then probably closer to 3-5k on the speakers. This is where you can really start to see audio quality shine. I don't think you need to spend 10k+ to see ridiculous quality, but for those who think a $500 home theatre box are 'good' they are really missing out.All that said, that is where the XLR (balanced) connections start to make a difference, the specific sound processing qualities, and the overall capabilities of the tested item are measured. It would be great to follow this review up with these same items, but connected to a real, high-quality setup for review.Love the article and look forward to more follow-ups!
 
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