erasergate Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 Way back in college, when purchasing a PC, you need to purchase separate sound card for audio/music. Nowadays, it's already built in in the motherboard. I wonder, will buying a separate sound card will have great effect in sound quality ? If so,, is it worth the price ? Checking online, it's usually $100 for entry level sound card. Next question is, I know sound card improves the overall sound but what do sound card really do in technical terms ? Link to comment
yamamoto2002 Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 What sound device does To add sound rendering(output) or capturing(input) ports to PC. Sound output device is selectable by OS provided settings user interface or userland API. About sound quality Motherboard built-in audio sound quality varies from superb level to very bad (constant hiss and/or intermittent noise heard). If you are unlucky to have not so good sound implementation of motherboard, buying sound card or external USB DAC may improve sound quality. There may be extra functions only provided by sound card / USB audio interfaces: DSD playback/recording XLR balanced sound output/input Phantom power supply function to use condenser microphone for sound recording MIDI in/out to control MIDI piano keyboards or hardware sound synthesizers External word clock input/output to synchronize multiple audio/video equipment, Hardware realtime sound DSP for stage performance / You Tube live Dolby Atmos decoder functionality to map virtually positioned speaker sound to 12 channel real speakers Sunday programmer since 1985 Developer of PlayPcmWin Link to comment
erasergate Posted May 12, 2020 Author Share Posted May 12, 2020 4 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said: What sound device does To add sound rendering(output) or capturing(input) ports to PC. Sound output device is selectable by OS provided settings user interface or userland API. About sound quality Motherboard built-in audio sound quality varies from superb level to very bad (constant hiss and/or intermittent noise heard). If you are unlucky to have not so good sound implementation of motherboard, buying sound card or external USB DAC may improve sound quality. There may be extra functions only provided by sound card / USB audio interfaces: DSD playback/recording XLR balanced sound output/input Phantom power supply function to use condenser microphone for sound recording MIDI in/out to control MIDI piano keyboards or hardware sound synthesizers External word clock input/output to synchronize multiple audio/video equipment, Hardware realtime sound DSP for stage performance / You Tube live Dolby Atmos decoder functionality to map virtually positioned speaker sound to 12 channel real speakers Wow.. thank you for prompt reply. Very informative. To improve sound from my pc... I need amp, DAC, USB soundcard (PCIe is not an option for me for current setup) ? Can I connect 3 of them ? Or just choose 1 or 2 of them ? Link to comment
yamamoto2002 Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 I 'm not topicality police, but this is Objective-Fi sub-forum where people discuss scientific / objective audio. So I don't say about my subjective opinion to improve sound 😁 There are several ways of connecting PC to speakers. Sunday programmer since 1985 Developer of PlayPcmWin Link to comment
Popular Post sandyk Posted May 13, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted May 13, 2020 On 5/13/2020 at 12:12 AM, yamamoto2002 said: I 'm not topicality police, but this is Objective-Fi sub-forum where people discuss scientific / objective audio. So I don't say about my subjective opinion to improve sound 😁 There are several ways of connecting PC to speakers. Hi Yamamoto You have also missed Coax and Optical SPDIF from the Soundcard, which is usually of a higher order than Motherboard SPDIF due to the Soundcards additional PSU filtering, and can often be way better than many typical USB implementations . A decent Soundcard also gives the possibility of both Analogue Output AND SPDIF Output, along with a direct Headphone Output.. The quality of the internal DAC in the Soundcard ,including it's Analogue implementation is often better than that of many cheap external DACs, (including measurement wise) such as with the Asus Xonar card series and others. Kind Regards Alex sphinxsix and yamamoto2002 1 1 How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file. PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020 Link to comment
Popular Post yamamoto2002 Posted May 14, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted May 14, 2020 Thank you SandyK san, surely digital output is easier to isolate noise from PC 🙂 BTW Here is my superb quality motherboard onboard analog output. (This is Asus Rog Strix Z370-i motherboard, it has some variant of Realtek ALC1220 DAC.) One and a half and The Computer Audiophile 2 Sunday programmer since 1985 Developer of PlayPcmWin Link to comment
yamamoto2002 Posted May 14, 2020 Share Posted May 14, 2020 Added SandyK-san's suggested setup (Setup 3) sandyk 1 Sunday programmer since 1985 Developer of PlayPcmWin Link to comment
Miska Posted May 22, 2020 Share Posted May 22, 2020 Biggest benefit of a real sound card in PC is it's proper DMA capability. With USB interface you need constant intensive CPU activity to deal with USB audio class protocol. With a traditional sound card the audio hardware and player software can share the same memory buffer. Player places data in the buffer and the audio card reads it out by itself straight from the system RAM. On positive side, you are also not exposed to the limitations of USB Audio Class and such. On negative side, each piece of hardware needs it's own custom driver for the OS. Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
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