Soundcard with quality analogue output?

fish99 · 14 Apr 2006 at 10:51

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.

fish99 · 14 Apr 2006 at 10:57

Anyone used E-MU 0404? (£60)

fish99 · 15 Apr 2006 at 01:08

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

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...

fish99 · 15 Apr 2006 at 04:19

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.

fish99 · 17 Apr 2006 at 22:51

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

Is that just in digital mode or analogue too?

fish99 · 18 Apr 2006 at 00:33

Okeydokey. Sounds like audio creation mode is the best mode for listenning to music then. Think I will get one afterall.

Cheers for the info