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

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Who even uses a sound card anymore..... HDMI out to my VSX-1121K pioneer receiver and i get lossless PCM stream through the NVIDIA card. I take that back.. I use my sound card for my microphone... sorry
 
Who even uses a sound card anymore..... HDMI out to my VSX-1121K pioneer receiver and i get lossless PCM stream through the NVIDIA card. I take that back.. I use my sound card for my microphone... sorry
 


What's that mean exactly. It sounds like you have a correlation that you would like to make but haven't said it.

 


And so is the Xonar. There is a great quote from Mark K at http://audioheuristics.org owns both the Benchmark and the Xonar and he'll even tell you he can't pick them apart.

He posted this publicly at the Techtalk forum at Parts Express.

Is it sad the the reviewers couldn't distinguish or sad that the Benchmark couldn't distinguish itself.

I'm not so much a fan of testing a device as testing the claims people make. There have been a lot of people that I have fed a crow pie to in that regard more than once.
 


Have a dedicated home theater and dedicated 2.0 system. So I use a sound card for one and HDMI to receiver for the other.

 
Realtek Audio, and my USB Plantronics Gamecom 780 headset provide me with a wonderful music listening experience, and I didn't even have to break the $100 mark for it. I think people are too willing to just drop thousands of dollars on gear thinking it's 'the best' just because they can. Really they're just ripping themselves off in the end.
 
I just got a little sound card adapter that cost $4.95 from Profound Sound that gave me a 10 band graphic equalizer and it really boosted my pathedic Dr Dre crap that HP is fobbing off on pc's these days plus it plays over my HDMI connections which good ole Dr wasn't capable of.
 
Great review and as usual Toms hits the high spots. I just added a ProFound Sound Card download with a ten band equalizer for under 5 bucks that feels and sounds like it doubled the clarity and strength of my Bose speakers, so as this review points out you don't have to spend a ton of money to get good sound. I had the Dr Dre mess HP is fobbing off and it wasn't even capable of playing over HDMI which I use; this little program did the trick and when you crank it up the cock roaches even run off.
 
CD players, Blu-Ray players, they are just devices with outputs. CD players being a 1980's technology just have fewer features. Not sure what 'Purpose Built' has to do with the price of tea. I would take the Oppo 105 and put it up head to head with any CD transport at any price.
I would like to reverse your point and put a high-end cd-player like a Wadia head to head with any other digital playback device. You will hear that the cd player sounds the best of all.
 
Eyy, having a good equaliser is important too (though I use a software equaliser). You can get some really good stuff for cheap prices, and as most people here have said, what matters more is the hardware you use to listen (headphones/speakers).
If you can, I'd get away from that Dr Dre crap though 😛 It's probably just as awful as that Turtle Beach crap EB Games tries to sell for outrageous prices.

 
very interesting reading, I kind of agree the conclusion. would be good if you can use speakers to do all these testes again.
 
Used my M-Audio AV40 stereo speakers for over two years with an Auzentech X-Fi Forte sound card, then I tried them using an ALC889 onboard audio solution and the latter sounded very muffled, and basically just horrible in movies, music and video games.My audiophile headphones also sounded much better with the Forte sound card. Maybe the latest solution from Realtek is much better, or maybe the reviewers don't know how to test.The ultimate test is to use high quality speakers for quite a while with a good sound card, then switch to onboard audio and see if it's just as good.
 
I don't know what's your intention on writing such an article, but do you believe what you write? Why don't you use something like rudistor rp030 to drive HD800 and listen to some classical music?
 
This article is a total fail due to lack of testing of the bane of integrated sound: interference noise.It does not require an audiophile or a sophisticated benchmark to tell the difference. Just move the mouse, and you hear electric noise. Start winrar or 7-zip benchmark, and you hear interference noise.When I used a CRT monitor, it was even worse. Each screen change caused noise.So, I bougth an Asus Xonar DG just because of noise. Once I plugged my cheap Sennheiser 202 headphones, I heard total silence.I never found any integrated sound without noise. (The last one I bought was a Realtek on board of an Asus P6T).By the way, I should say that the sennheiser phones are not only of good sound quality, but also rough. I bought them 5 or 6 years ago, and they never broke. Before I had tons of headphones which broke after some months or at maximum a year of use. But the sennheiser ones seem unbreakable.
 
Noise is generally a sign of a poor-quality PSU. My HTPC is using the onboard sound card (though admittedly via Optical), and you have turn turn the receiver up really high to hear any noise. I'll have to see what it's like over a 3.5mm>2xRCA cable.
 
Something is radically wrong here. Come to my house and you WILL hear the difference between RedBook CD and SACD and DVD Audio. If you can't hear the difference, then there is a problem with either your source material, your equipment or your ears, - or some combination. The difference between PCM and DSD is easily detectable. TELARC built their reputation, and received dozens of Grammys for technical excellence, based on their transformerless DSD recording and production chain. The difference in the soundfield between RedBook and DSD is extraordianry and immediately noticeable. I all can say about this article is...WOW!
 
It's just too bad you didn't use the free ASIO4all driver. I use it all the time for motherboard sound outputs. Works incredibly and on just about any sound card or on board. Then you could have tested the Realtek at any setting it is capable of.
 
I have the Xonar ST with the PCI slot. I upgraded with the highest end amps which were $3.50 each. Anything higher would require soldering. Use with my $500 Sony headphones and love it for music and games.
 


Yes, I agree that the Xonar STX is a nice sound card. There are some Audio Precision reports on this card on the Internet. ASUS has done some really spectacular devices lately.

If you've read my 2nd comment, somewhere lost&hidden in this long list of thread, you'd see that I've actually performed a quick comparison between the ALC898 to the Xonar Essence One. And there are differences!

So in my 3rd comment, which you've quoted, I was merely using Benchmark as an example (didn't bother to list the other variants) comparing to the $2 onboard chip, because this article's conclusion was comparing $2 vs $2k.

So now, I'm not quite sure what your motive was stating that 'Benchmark couldn't distinguish itself"?! Do you have some personal experiences with the Benchmark DAC that you'd like to share?
 
I'm assuming he means that it could be EITHER of these two options; he doesn't know.

a) The reviewers couldn't tell the difference between them because they don't know how to; sad for reviewers, because it means they're somewhat unskilled/incompetent.

OR

b) There wasn't a major difference for the Benchmark, so the (perfectly capable) reviewers couldn't tell the difference. Sad for the Benchmark, because it should perform better.

Note that this is my interpretation, not his words.
 
I would go so far as to say that any single upgrade of audio technology I've ever done has been an improvement - gosh, the soundblaster Live! 1024, the Audigy 2 ZS, the EMU 1212m, all of them provided more clarity and precision than previous, and all of them were sending to the same amp, speaker cable and speakers.

Its one thing to say its just placebo effect and its quite another when a better sound card reveals more detail than you've ever heard before.
 
Apologies if this has been covered already, there are already 200 comments.I need to counter-rebuke your A/B/C/D argument.Regardless of your aim to find out whether one component sounds better or worse than another, your methodology is still incorrect. The reason for this is that "better" and "worse" are subjective terms which needlessly introduce additional psychological factors to the testing process. You can see this in Listener A's comments - the listener knows that accurate and pleasant sound are not necessarily the same thing, so is second-guessing himself trying to identify the devices. This should never be the responsibility of the listener regardless of what he does or does not know. Only once it has been properly established that there is an identifiable difference between two sources (A/B), then the listener is qualified to offer a subjective preference without any further testing.Secondly, two samples per device is far too few for statistical significance, although I'm glad you didn't play each track 48 times because that wouldn't have produced any meaningful information either (see above). Now, you could argue that you are only looking for glaringly obvious subjective preferences, and you didn't find any. That is fine, but in this case you've wasted a lot of time and pages without offering anything more scientific than the (presumably audiophile) testing approach you criticize in your conclusion. What's worse is that the article is couched in a veil of objectivity, including advocacy of A/B testing but without even a basic understanding of why it produces meaningful results (clearly shown by the belief that the modified methodology is superior). Let's be clear: your results don't show a difference between any of the products. They also don't show the lack of difference between any of the products. In other words, they don't show anything at all, which I could have told you before you ran the tests.Please don't waste your time testing more devices - start with two and do it properly.
 


I ordered a Benchmark ($1800). This was ~3 years ago. Had several friends over (we are all DIY speaker designers) and none of us could pick out the EMU from the Benchmark. I had the Benchmark for 20 of the 30 day return period.

They are both good units.

 
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