Onboard vs Card - Stupid Q but hey ho.

[ATIorNvidia]

NOTE: I am only taking about digital out in this post. Not Analogue. For Analogue, yes the sound quality is still better than motherboard audio. But that gap is also closing.

I reckon 99% of people will fail a double blind test between decent onboard audio and a high end DAC (filters/EQ off, properly volume matching by output voltage)

 

[Admetos]

I reckon 99% of people will fail a double blind test between decent onboard audio and a high end DAC (filters/EQ off, properly volume matching by output voltage)

There is a big difference between mother board audio and high end DAC, a DAC such as the Hegel D50, it's silly to even try and compare them.

 

[alex24]

There is a big difference between mother board audio and high end DAC, a DAC such as the Hegel D50, it's silly to even try and compare them.

There is, but 99% of people would still struggle to tell them apart.

 

[hornetstinger]

There is, but 99% of people would still struggle to tell them apart.

99% of people have crappy PC speakers.

 

[ATIorNvidia]

There is a big difference between mother board audio and high end DAC, a DAC such as the Hegel D50, it's silly to even try and compare them.

I'm sure that's what you tell yourself.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

99% of people have crappy PC speakers.

I would agree a lot with this a bit, but I won't keep it relgated to PC speakers only.

It's not a major improvement, but the Edifier MR4s I've got, whilst not on the must have list by a long shot by many audiophiles, did highlight to me the major difference between your "typical" speaker (usually this is a PC speaker set but not always) and a set of speakers that is actually trying to reproduce sound on all fronts.

Like in another thread, I believe it was about the MR5s, that user and myself (on my MR4s) heard stuff (Is that a triangle in that I hear???) we never realised was part of the track we were listening to, all because those (previous worse) speakers couldn't produce those sounds properly/well. But we were still only using onboard and standard stereo line out feeds to the speaker.

Much like visual/graphical work, the entire pipeline realistically needs to be on the same level for you to get everything out of it. It's no good connecting an old 16bit colour display to your RTX 5090 and running Ray/Pathtracing games on it and finding it looks bad, or getting an QDOLED for photo work but you're using a GPU that can only output 6 bit per colour channel (so not even 8, much less the 10 or 12). And in this case, many forget about the Speakers, and end up having a less and desireable experience after the investment elsewhere along the audio pipeline.

 

[Gray2233]

I reckon 99% of people will fail a double blind test between decent onboard audio and a high end DAC (filters/EQ off, properly volume matching by output voltage)

You're more or less correct, but a lot of onboard audio is poorly isolated which results in notable problems.

That said, I would rate the importance in an audio chain as follows:

Source of audio (mastering matters a lot, as does file quality) > AMP/Speakers/Headphones > appreciable cables, a cheap sufficient gauge copper wire will almost always be indistinguishable to higher end options and you do not need to spend silly money.

DAC fits in weirdly but should if decent be the last part of the chain, a £50-100 DAC with the right bit rate will be absolutely fine. People tend to conflate DAC with "device" which includes a ton of features, rather than the actual chip doing the work.

I used to do headphone and speaker meets, met many a person that spent bucketloads on DAC and wire but either flat out refused to do double blind tests or when they did failed horribly. Usually older gents with more cash to spend that refused to acknowledge that hearing diminishes with age much like everything else, but the same absolutely held true for the handful of younger people involved.

 

[ATIorNvidia]

You're more or less correct, but a lot of onboard audio is poorly isolated which results in notable problems.

That said, I would rate the importance in an audio chain as follows:

Source of audio (mastering matters a lot, as does file quality) > AMP/Speakers/Headphones > appreciable cables, a cheap sufficient gauge copper wire will almost always be indistinguishable to higher end options and you do not need to spend silly money.

DAC fits in weirdly but should if decent be the last part of the chain, a £50-100 DAC with the right bit rate will be absolutely fine. People tend to conflate DAC with "device" which includes a ton of features, rather than the actual chip doing the work.

I used to do headphone and speaker meets, met many a person that spent bucketloads on DAC and wire but either flat out refused to do double blind tests or when they did failed horribly. Usually older gents with more cash to spend that refused to acknowledge that hearing diminishes with age much like everything else, but the same absolutely held true for the handful of younger people involved.

I agree with everything here. I own and still sometimes use external DACs/audio interfaces to address issues where it's needed... Ground loop noises or other interferences that pop up with certain combinations of gear.

What I don't do is trick myself into believing the DAC is making my soundstage wider, my imaging deeper, my bass "tighter", and other nonsense like that.

 

[Gray2233]

I agree with everything here. I own and still sometimes use external DACs/audio interfaces to address issues where it's needed... Ground loop noises or other interferences that pop up with certain combinations of gear.

What I don't do is trick myself into believing the DAC is making my soundstage wider, my imaging deeper, my bass "tighter", and other nonsense like that.

I'd say that most people lean toward liking a specific sound signature at most, and the same thing can be achieved with an EQ more often than not despite what many purists will state.

Obviously you're not going to overcome certain speakers/headphones in house sound, that absolutely does exist, just not at the DAC or cable level.

 

[Quartz]

Ok guys. I agree with you, however, what I have been doing today, is I have both the ONBOARD and the SOUNDCARD both working, and I am using the same hardware, and just selecting the output device and simply plugging in the Optical cable, and the audio is definitely different.

If you're using the SPDIF link you may be limited by the bandwidth of that link (1.5 Mb/s). Consider using an external USB device.

 

[mrk]

Did you check that the option for "full range sound" in Windows legacy sound settings is ticked? If it's not then Windows Audio stack will be expecting a speaker set up that has satellites as opposed to speakers that can handle the full range of sound. Maybe this is why you are hearing a difference?

I'd say that most people lean toward liking a specific sound signature at most, and the same thing can be achieved with an EQ more often than not despite what many purists will state.

Keep in mind the signature also covers soundstage and imaging, something EQing does not touch, only the frequency range. Soundstage/imaging can only be user controlled on a very small number of external DACs/amps. So most of the time people will be relying on the factory tuning of soundstage and imaging capabilities of any given soundcard or DAC/amp.