Soundcard with quality analogue output?

fish99

fish99

fish99

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Just curious about which soundcards to look at for high quality analogue stereo output? Is an X-Fi a real improvement in this area, and would I be right in thinking the HDA cards are mainly about their digital output? (which is useless to me)

My PC is connected to a Sonic Impact t-amp and JBL Control 1 monitors, which are better quality than your average PC speakers, so I want to feed them better quality. My current card is Audigy 2 ZS.

Anything else I should be looking at - Emu cards for instance? I would prefer something that does at least EAX1+2.

One more related question - do any soundcard produce better quality midi than creative ones like the Audigy 2? Audigy 2 midi - they sort of sound like real instruments, but the sounds are very weak. Anything better available in this area?

Cheers,
Simon.
 
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I have had the santa cruz (also known as videologic sonic fury) for several years now and have the stereo analogue connected to my amp + floortsanders + headphones.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/santacruz/

I certainly wouldn't consider a new (xfi et al) soundcard for a long long time yet (until the PCI slot becomes extinct). Too many people complain about creatives drivers ad software as wel as having experienced badness with creative cards in general over the years.

If you can find a cruz card (ebay etc) then by all means buy one, use the 6193 Turtle Beach drivers (early and cd drivers had stability iissues which were fixed in 2005) and enjoy high quality music/gaming (EAX 1+2 amongst others).

I think you will find that if you do get one that the drivers and software are by far the friendliest and most stable drivers you will probably ever come across for a soundcard EVER.
 
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Thanks :) Sounds good from the review and there's a few available pretty cheap.

It's hard to resist the Creative marketting though, even though it's probably all BS :D Never really had any problems with creatives drivers from SBPro, through Awe64, SBLive, Audigy and now Audigy 2.

Seems that most of these cards are about digital output now rather than quality analogue, even the E-Mu.

I'll have a think...
 
^ Assuming the card work, it is rare for people to complain about what they've been using for years ;)

From what I've gathered, the CS4624/CS4630 based cards - which include the Cruz, are end of line product. If Creative support is dodgy, there is basically no support for the Cruz from what I've gathered. Furthermore, looking at forums like in 3dss and head-fi, it seems a fair number of Cruz owners "graduated" to the Revo line cards a good while ago (then went on to other things). I've seen more than one reference of those. You can also check out this thread. I am pretty sure that they are not talking digital out either, since you don't exactly plug headphones to the digital out. And if you wanted to use a DAC, the digital out performance probably won't vary much, at least amongst those that are capable of bit perfect output. I've also heard the X-Fi (non Elite Pro series) being mentioned as fairly competitive with the EMU 0404. I don't know how much truth is there to that statement though.

I have the impression that the Cruz was good for it's time, but there is little reason of going for those cards if you were to buy one today. Cost saving aside.
 
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Yeah, I was looking at the M-Audio cards too, the Revo 5.1 and Audiophile 24/96. The CPU usage of those cards is pretty bad though compared to Audigy 2/X-Fi. I really don't want to sacrifice in-game framerates.

Just read The Tech Reports very detailed review of the X-Fi XM and surprisingly it didn't beat an Audigy 2 ZS in some of the sound quality tests, and the reviewer found the Crystalizer a waste of time (no surprise there then). In the listenning tests though it did perform well, just about ahead of the Revo and Audigy 2.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/soundblaster-x-fi/index.x?pg=1

Does seem like there isn't a huge amount to gain by upgrading from an Audigy 2 to pretty much anything else though, especially if you want to keep EAX and low CPU utilization in games.
 
For music there is little reason why the X-Fi would not beat the A2ZS.. unless for some subjective reason (the audio CD test seemed subjective), the reviewer happen to prefer the difference between sound of the A2ZS to the X-Fi. From a hardware point of view, the A2ZS and X-Fi (Xtreme Music to Fatal1ty) use the same DAC and op-amp. So the real difference is the fact that the A2ZS is known to resample to 48khz using a pretty poor algorithm. The X-Fi has an improved algorithm, and also support 44.1khz (no resampling) in one of the mode.

The CMSS implementation is also improved (if you game with headphones).

The reason I am kinda turned off by the M-Audio card is because they are rather expensive when you consider how cheap the can't-be-found-in-the-UK chaintech card is in comparison.. when they are both based on the same Envy chip (although granted, they may not have the same op-amp).

For music, the EMU 0404 is most likely an upgrade to the A2ZS, although how much you sacrifice in terms of gaming compared to an X-Fi is debatable.
 
So you're saying stuff like MP3s and game sounds are in 44KHz, but Audigy 2/X-Fi actually output in 48 KHz and need to resample everything? How odd :D

Is that just in digital mode or analogue too?
 
Everything. Digital and analogue AFAIK. I -think- it is because the DSP work at 48Khz and there is no way to bypass it in the case of the A2ZS. It is worth noting that the resampling does not occur in Audio Creation mode in the X-Fi, and you don't actually have to be making music to use that mode.

Oh yea, when it comes to digital out, the A2ZS is not "bit perfect". It is another area the X-Fi improved.
 
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