Do soundcards actually make a difference or are they just a meme

Do soundcards actually make a difference or are they just a meme

Yes

Meme for stupid gaymer faggots and gullible audiophiles.

yea but if you're planning on getting on i suggest just buying a dac/amp system

Yes

good for movie making/music/audio production

or just for an e-peen vanity buy

otherwise you're good with onboard

If you need to ask then you don't need it as onboard audio solution will suffice for your purposes. A high quality sound card is small part of an elaborate audio setup with a proper audio board and high quality headphones. If you don't have over $500 invested in audio equipment there's no way you'll have any need for a sound card.

Depends.
If you buy it because you need extra connections which are not present on your motherboard - it's no doubt relevant purchase.
If you buy it because you think it will make any difference with modern built-in Realtek chips - you are very wrong and are going to waste money on a useless piece of hardware. Better invest into good speakers or headphones.

they have more features, but unless you're doing recording, the sound output is the same (as in, "not audibly differentiable from") as your onboard computer dac

best advice

google the toms hardware comparison of dacs

This is the only correct answer

Don't listen to the holier-than-thou audio people in this thread. I have an msi z77 gd-65 with HD 558's and there was a very noticeably improvement just with an asus xonar souncard.

Different question: I run a 3.5mm from my computers audio jack to my av receiver with a 5.1 speaker setup. Is there a better way to handle the pc to receiver connection?

yes
digital audio (SPDIF)
it will be either an optical jack or an RCA one.

It is currently 3.5mm to RCA. I don't have RCA on my mobo. Will check for spdif. Can I expect a noticeable improvement?

>people connect their headphones to the connector on the front of their PC
>they get a soundcard
>now connect it directly to the soundcard output at the back
>"wow it sounds so much better with a dedicated soundcard!"

90% of the time this is what happened

yea, you can tell that is a high end one too, the gold capacitors make things sound 100x better

skip it and get an external usb DAC/AMP.

figure out the realtek dac on your mobo and you tell me

its been shown that the alc889 is as good as a $2000 dac

They do make a difference. ALC889 or whatever means nothing. The specs for a given DAC chip or OPAMP mean only set a maximum limit of what's achievable. What matters is the implementation. Onboard sound implementations are almost always pure shit.

I couldn't care less that you achieve a THD of 0.0001% in your tests, if I get a blast of goddamn white noise in my ears every time I move the mouse.

I recommend the Creative Audigy2 ZS. It's about $10 on ebay and it has great Linux support.

Your computer will weigh more with one installed.

but did it actually make a difference?

In some computers it will, as the soundcard has more shielding than the cord running to the front panel, and a computer inside is a noisy environment electrically.

They do jack shit for playing audio. Recording audio is a different story.

They did and somewhat still do.
As others have said, just get an external DAC now if on board isn't good enough.

It's not 2006 or even 2010 any more ,most motherboards have really good onboard sound now, seperate PCB layers for left/right, good caps, decent dacs - most can push over 118db SNR now, my older USB DAC can only 114db...

For most everything, onboard is now good enough.

They do jack shit for playing audio unless you went with a bargain bin motherboard*

It's not though. There's a tangible difference between RealTek onboard shit and a decent sound card using nothing more than a $60 Sony MDR-V6.

I'm willing to bet you'd fail a blind test

>They do jack shit for playing audio
>Jack shit
Heheheheheheh

I have that exact soundcard and they aren't a meme if you buy proper headphones. You don't need one for anything below 300 € headphones, better 600.

Absolute highest of memes

If you have an DECENT external AMP (Not the shitty one built into your logitech crap) its DAC will sound as good as your memecard if not better

Is it possible to use both a good soundcard and a DAC/AMP set up?

This.

Onboard sound cannot process audio at low latency.

DORVAK keyboards will definitely make you type faster.

considering that most aftermarket soundcards have different connections than onboard sound cards, yes they make a difference.

I use one because I can hook up speakers via xlr instead of 3.5mm trs

gaming.. maybe. as they typically can do the whole 3d surround sound thing.

for music? nah. just get an external amp/dac. if you have a good pair of headphone/speakers that will benefit, anyhow.

Oh no, the static noise is quite clearly audible and completely mitigated via an USB soundcard.
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''onboard audio''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

>6ch pci soundcard is 15USD w/ 1Vrms output
>8ch pci-e soundcard is 70USD w/ 2Vrms output
>8ch usb dac is 300USD
sucks there isn't a solution to master clock multiple 2ch usb dacs so they don't fall out of sync.

>using an MDR V6
Sorry bud, I own a pair, and there's hardly a difference in sound quality.
Newer mobos are good enough.

Now a DAC/amp is a different story

Basically anyone arguing for a soundcard fell for the mememe

They're not worth it if you have a shitty pair of headphones.

If you have at least mid-tier quality headphones, or even just ones that require an amp, then a dedicated soundcard makes a difference.

You should invest in a decent pair of headphones instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a soundcard or an external DAC though.

or install a system wide equalizer

audio engineer here. you are wrong

It used to be more pronounced back in the day.

I remember on my pentium 133 with integrated sound any time I was listening to mp3s If I scrolled a web browser window the song would start skipping.

I bought my soundcard for the DAC/amp. Software audio processing is fine.

I can literally hear my computer loading web pages when I'm using the on board sound card.

It's not always a waste of money, but if you have shit Logitech speakers or something, it probably is.

I never realized how much engineers talk out of their ass until I became one myself.

>capacitors
>makes it sound better

no, it just makes it sound less-bad.

OP, dedicated sound cards are good if you find your internal sound has problems such as noise, or lacks a particular features (sample rates/bit depth, output current, input jacks)

I used to be able to hear my wireless adaptor and wireless mouse even when using an internal card. Proper sheilding, powersupply conditioning and decoupling are more important than having fancy capacitors and op-amps.

these problems are usually all sorted with an external dac/adc. Power supplies will be cleaner, you can pick and choose features to suit your need/budget (inputs/outputs/balanced/digital,etc)

tl;dr, if you're going to shell out cash on a sound card, get an external one.

What do you suggest?
Any resources you would care to share? Perhaps not necessarily entry-level information, but information you generally found valuable.

yes, but if you're going to a dac, you may as well just run s/pdif from your mobo, or usb.
running digital from a dedicated sound-card has only the potential benifit of reduced jitter, which unless you're having problems with your inbuilt s/pdif, there's no reason to bother with it.

>my shitty chink mobo oscillates

No way. I am completely shocked.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm looking to be able to run Audioengine a5 speakers from my tower - so I think an audio card is really the only way to go, anyway if I want something with R/L jacks.

if you want seperate rca jacks for left and right and don't want another item on your desk then yeah, a sound card is your best option.

I'd take you up on that. You have to have some kind of hearing loss to not be able to tell the difference. There is audible background hissing on almost all of the onboard solutions that I've heard. The only exception was an onboard Creative chip that sounded decent. But even that one sounded muddy to me, although that probably had more to do with the opamps used rather than the DAC itself.

What would eliminate electronic noise bleeding into my headphones?

biggest meymey you can imagine.

Yes, I greatly notice it.
Think I still preferred my external amp but still incredible upgrade over onboard.

I got a creative xi-fi and i like it way better over the onboard chip on a MSI Z77a-G45 which is supposed to have a decent chip. The latest motherboards should be up to par with low end sound cards though with the ALC1150 and Supreme FX onboard chips.

Not many onboard sound chips will let you do bitstream transcoding to spdif.

In a lot of computers the wire leading to the front panel connecters hovers up EMI and you get hissing in the background.

Often just plugging into the onboard ports at the back removes it, but if they buy a sound card instead of trying those ports they'll never know.

Read this review once where they compared on board audio that's like $1 against a sound card that is $200 and two DAC's that were $500 and $2000 respectively. Test was done on some HD800 and it concluded that the only thing that made a difference between the 4 options was that the on board just sounded by default -5db. The rest were the same. At the end day it came down to the Headset you were using and the sound quality of the audio file. And if you get any sound coming from on board assuming that it's really old you can get a USB DAC for like $10 dollars. Do what you will with this information.

They used to be important but they stopped being important when Vista came around and completely changed how Windows' audio subsystem works.

This is still a thing in 2016?
I haven't had that issue with anything made after 1999.

Depends entirely on what you compare it to and somewhat what you are plugging into it. It may or may not. What it will give you is better performance on paper compared to a standard on-board codec and a more robust set of I/O options and features.

/hpg/ checklist for your basic DAC/amplifier needs for headphones:

-Is it too quiet?
-Is the output impedance too high (fixable by equalization)?
-Is there noise/EMI or hiss to it?
-Does it sound distorted as you start to crank up the volume?
If the answer is no, don't get one.

Realtek HD -> Xonar D1. Huge audible difference on even on multimedia speakers. Scene is much bigger, bass is tighter. One of the best purchases in my PC.

Do you are sound producer, composer who uses a lot of VST's or some related shit?
No?
Then yes, it's a meme. For you.

I believed that until yesterday.
Today I realized I was a lucky guy.
My fucking room hasn't a functional ground, and I had a 1000 watt workstation here.
Seriously, check you ground.

And still is laggy as fuck if you use it for production, unless you set Jack or Asio.

For me just a big marketing meme i didn't notice difference but the drive of my xonar essence is not compatible with windows 7 and i use amateur drivers i thinks it's not work like profesionnel drivers but the amplification or the sound really worn and tired
driver of my logitech 2.1 of 2010 but when new it was great even on realteck chipset I can not imagine that monitor speakers give as improved audio quality level

ITT deaf people comparing integrated sound to cheap gaymen soundcards while using earbuds.

>I CAN LISTEN TO THINGS THAN ONLY GOD CAN EAR
That's why do you spend three grand in fucking two meters of cable.

I just switched from this to onboard audio on the ASUS maximus VIII. I am not really of the change in sound signature

most on board sound systems are better than sound cards you can buy.

proof?

just spend your extra money on headphones

>most on board sound systems are better than sound cards you can buy.

measured my own motherboard at .6Vrms, that's fine for HTiaB but for pro-amps you need .75/.82/1/1.2/1.4Vrms (for speaker usage) to utilize the full range of the amp.

M-Audio Fast Track Pro made some difference for me (both at home and on PA system I used to work on).

They are literally useless, because if you care about sound quality (input or output), you'll use an external DAC.

Soudcard are utile if you need XLR or more than 2 chanel in input or output, nothing else

I'm not knowledgeable with audio, but I have a question.

With a DAC are you not just amplifying the motherboard audio? Do how does it sound better?

DAC is not an amplifier. Its a converter literally.

>
>I'm not knowledgeable with audio, but I have a question.
>With a DAC are you not just amplifying the motherboard audio? Do how does it sound better?
What
DAC means Digital to Analog Converter
It's the thing that convert audio signal in order to make it compatible with your analog ears

So converting a digital signal to analogue adds quality. How does this work?

...

for those soundcards which have both internel and external optical ports, is it possible to plug in lets say, my blu ray player into my pc via the internal optical port and listen to the sound using my pc headphones via the pc?

There is always a DAC.

Either inside the PC, where you get all sorts of interference so quality is always shit.
Or outside, where you can get decent quality.

Both the motherboard and the sound card are inside the PC, so neither can produce decent quality.

>So converting a digital signal to analogue adds quality
You already own speakers/headphones, why would anyone buy more expensive ones?

They did a while ago, now only useful for audiophiles and professional use.