£60 budget what sound card?

Sparky

Sparky

Sparky

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As title , my Asus Xonar Essence seems to be dead so new card time. What would you suggest for £60ish ?

I only use the card for music and will miss the 124db of the Asus but oh well.
 
sound blaster z- used it's not worth more than £40-£50

asus strix soar i see regular going for £35-£40 used

or one of the external x3 g5 g6 offerings but those are more money

A £60 external dac will probably stack up against a soundcard if you're not in to all the software side like dolby headphone and creatives surround solutions and just want straight up stereo

A £30 asus will probably do if you don't have expensive headphones
 
C64 said:
asus strix soar i see regular going for £35-£40 used

or one of the external x3 g5 g6 offerings but those are more money
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Strix Soar/Raid Pro have horrible for headphone use 100 ohm output impedance.

Creative has B-stock Sound BlasterX G6 for £70, though its out of stock at the moment.
That's very good price for the hardware.
 
EsaT said:
Strix Soar/Raid Pro have horrible for headphone use 100 ohm output impedance.

Creative has B-stock Sound BlasterX G6 for £70, though its out of stock at the moment.
That's very good price for the hardware.
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Oh I thought the soar had a 600ohm headphone amp only mentioned as you can get em for £37 and probably cant be matched for £37
 
Headphone amp being able to drive 600 Ohm headphones is not the same as the output impedance. Ideally, if the impedance output is 100 Ohms, then you'd want to use 800 Ohm headphones. For a sound card aimed at gaming, that is pretty bad. Vast majority of people will be using low impedance headphones and headsets, so such a high impedance output is far from ideal.

Essence STX/II is about 10 Ohms output impedance. Not ideal for low impedance headphones, but massively better than the rubbish that is the Strix sound cards.

While not a sound card, a Schiit Magni 3 has an output impedance of 0.2 Ohms. Fulla 3, which is more aimed at gaming, has an output impedance of 0.5 Ohms.

100 Ohm output is pretty bad.
 
yea but what else can ya get for £40-£60 the creative z even gets panned on audio science
Yea it's not great but someone with a headset and low end speakers isn't going to benefit from lower output impedance
My xonar dx is 100ohm and even though I use a magni connecting to it direct isn't massively bad it is compared to like you say a decent headphone amp

It's either the low end £30 ish creative or asus cards a creative sound blaster z or something like the soar in this budget.I always look in the returns/used section of a certain website for deals on soundcards can get some good deals.

What impedance is the sound blaster z can get those for £50-£60 i still think the soar is a steal at £40 or less and add a headphone amp later though, it's not 220 ohm is it ?
 
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What motherboard are you using?

Some modern motherboards have fairly decent onboard sound, it might not actually be worth spending in that price range on a soundcard.
 
C64 said:
Oh I thought the soar had a 600ohm headphone amp
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Actually 600 ohm headphone would be one giving good electric damping factor with 100 ohm output impedance and 250 ohms would be decent.
Now if modern consumer headphones were in that impedance range...
But typical modern consumer headphone with 50 ohm and under impedance have it entirely the wrong way with ratio between headphone impedance and output's impedance.

Meaning there's very little electrical damping and it's mostly up to mechanical damping of air and diaphgram material to damp driver's unwanted movement.
But mechanical damping is always compromise, just like suspension of cars trying to keep tires on road while smoothing car's movement:
Stiffer shock absorbers and it's bumpy and harsh drive, because suspension can't follow road surface well.
Loose shock absorbers and it's bouncing jelly like drive.

Electrical damping can be visualized as pendulum moved around by some kind motor:
Pendulum's mass resists pushing and pulling, except at resonant frequency where pendulum starts to swing easily and wants to keep swinging.
Low damping factor is similar to motor being too weak compared to pendulum's mass and having problems pushing and pulling it.
High damping factor is similar to strong motor, which has no problems in controlling pendulum's movement accurately.


For some reason Asus has always had problems in that part of electrical engineering starting from Xonar D model.
Maybe that's their way of short circuit protecting output just in case someone sticks that good old fuse replacement called iron nail into output...
Or more likely circuit design fails to stay stable with every load without that big "speed limiter".
Just like TPA6120 based headphone amps usually have at least 10 ohm output impedance, because of its slew rate being more fit for AM radio transmitter than audio amplifier.

It's kinda "pick your incompetence" situation.
 
TALON1973 said:
Are soundcards still a thing ? Surely a dac / amp is a better combo ?
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a soundcard is just an internal dac of course still a thing as external dacs don't offer surround etc without software
Ive had a look at the g6 but its just a cmedia dac not that special no ? think i'd rather bag an ae5 at cutprice it's the same thing right ?

think of an external dac as a soundcard in a box as thats all it is
 
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TALON1973 said:
Are soundcards still a thing ? Surely a dac / amp is a better combo ?
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Those "DACs" are sound card minus ADC, DSP, possible surround channel outputs, binaural sound simulation/HRTF and probably few more things.

Sure if only purpose is to stream stereo recording they do fine.
But for gaming/movie watching those DACs are rather limited in capabilities by themselves.



C64 said:
Ive had a look at the g6 but its just a cmedia dac think i'd rather bag an ae5 at cutprice it's the same thing right ?
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It's Asus who uses C-Media sound chips.
Creative has long (always?) used own in house built chips with various features and processing power built in.
While not doing same sound rendering things as X-Fi's EMU20K in sound hardware acceleration era, G6's chip probably has more functionality than preceding chip of SB Z serie.
(which didn't need to be able to do HRTF by itself alone for console use)

And except in possibly low end models neither uses possible built in D/A converters, but adds separate DAC chip.
Also higher models usually have separate ADC.
 
yea my bad it uses the CS43131 cirrus logic always get cirrus mixed up with c-media
might give one a crack i feel creatives priced the Ae-5 wrong at least with the g6 its a future external travel dac etc
 
I just bought a creative x ae5 plus for £89, i'll let you know what I think compared to the old dx
 
Thanks for all the replies I don't game anymore so stereo is preferred. Just not sure which way to go. Somebody mentioned at work that swapping from full analogue headphones to NC headphones maybe to blame ?
 
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