

Who Needs a Sound Card, Anyway? - alexgartrell
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/who-needs-a-sound-card-anyway.html

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akronim
Seeing as the word "latency" doesn't make an appearance anywhere on the page,
I'm assuming anyone doing audio work will still benefit from a decent card.
(Why? Because when you hit a key on your midi keyboard/drums, and want it to
be like playing a piano/drumkit, you want the minimum latency before you hear
the note so it feels more like the real thing)

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jerf
If you wanna get pedantic, he _did_ say that the exception is people who
invested in quality headphones, and if you're doing audio work, that exception
probably covers you. I suppose there is a set of such people who only have
high-quality speakers and no quality headphones, but now we're really picking
nits.

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MostAwesomeDude
It's a nit worth picking; I am ever-so-slightly hearing-impaired (congenital)
to the point where I only need the $80 Bose headphones instead of the $300
imported-from-Europe headphones for my audio work, and motherboard sound cards
are fine for quality but horrid for latency.

Everybody's got their own needs. :3

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juiceandjuice
Right now I run my sound through a MOTU Ultralite, and I've got some Grados
SR60s and Audio Technica ATH-M40fs, which combined cost me under $100 (used
and on sale... but you can still get each pair for ~$60 - $70), as well as
some rebranded Altec Lansing UHP336. (Other headphones I've owned include the
MDR-7506 and DT-770s, and I've frequently used older sets of K240s and
HD-280s)

That being said, I think the notion that you need $300 head phones + $200 in
headphone amplification is absolute garbage. $60 in headphones will get you
80% of the way. My macbooks and my Thinkpads have had more than adequate drive
for my headphones, but there's still a small difference when you are driving
it with something like a MOTU/digidesign/whatever interface. Most the
interfaces I've used were as good or better than the midrange stuff when it
came to headphone amplification.

One thing I've noticed is that most DIY PCs tend to have much crappier noise
performance than my laptops, and the problem is always a million times worse
if you use the front panel audio jack. Not sure why, maybe that's why this guy
wrote this article.

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wladimir
Huh, what is this 'soundcard' thing he's talking about...

I haven't used a soundcard for more than 5 years. The last soundcard I bought
was an SB AWE128, which I think was something like 10 years ago... After that,
the motherboard integrated sound became pretty OK, at least for games and mp3
consumption, and from what I heard the SB cards were no longer getting better.

Sure, if you're a musician you might have other requirements. Or if you invest
in quality headphones _and_ quality music files (not lousy old mp3s :).

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wewyor
I used a bithead on my computer with good headphones and FLAC/Apple Lossless
files and it was nice, both linux and windows recognized the bithead right
away but once that broke my headphones just got plugged in straight to the
computer and the amplification isn't really a factor and not enough difference
is head by my ears to make me go out and buy another bithead.

Soundblaster is pretty awful now, plus it doesn't even work on linux but my
last card was a soundblaster as well probably around '05.

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georgieporgie
Several points which don't flow well into paragraphs:

1) On-board sound isn't very good, in my experience. Admittedly, my 2006
Macbook sounds considerably better than my 2010 Toshiba.

2) My favorite headphones are the Etymotic ER-4P. I found mine online for a
bit under $200. They're an almost perfect aural match for my beloved NHT 2.5i
speakers.

3) The Boostaroo is a horrible amp. Unbelievable hiss and distortion. I don't
know how they're still in business. If you need a portable amp, look for a
CMOY in an Altoids tin, off eBay. Cheap and (IMO) vastly superior.

4) A computer's case is about the worst environment I can think of for audio
electronics. Get any sound card which gives a digital out, and feed that into
any consumer-grade receiver that supports digital decoding, like a Pioneer
from Costco. This way, your uncorrupted digital stream gets converted to
analog well away from the noisy PC case. You'll be 90% of the way to a ultra-
high dollar sound for a couple hundred bucks.

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tintin
I totally agree with your points 1 and 4. Ofcourse your processor can
calculate sound, but it's the AC that is important. When I plug in my
headphones in my onboard soundcard and move my mouse I'm hearing noise and
hiss. When I play music I can hardly hear it, but it's there and you will
notice it when the music is soft.

Need great sound: get the digital signal out of your PC and have an AC outside
your hardware.

