SLI soundcards?

Can I SLI together sound cards for improved sound? I notice an SLI connector on some sound cards.

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Yes.
Definitely.

the rotational velocidensity might become a problem

Is crossfire superior? This one comes with a bonus crossfire card ready connected.

>sound card with a 6 pin
W H Y
H
Y

it gives cleaner power than power from the pcie slot apparently

older asus cards used a floppy connector (lol) and molex connectors

yes but its useless
since human ear can only hear no more than 30db

the dx used a floppy not for cleaner sound but because it used a pci - pci-express bridge and couldn't draw power from the pci-express slot. only the ds version which was pci came without a power connector and drew power form the pci slot.

The dsx is pcie and uses the same bridge, it dosent need a power connector. The phoebus uses a native pcie chip and has a power connector. They could all draw power from the pcie slot if asus designed it like that but they dont for cleaner power.

If you want improved sound, stop using sound cards and start using USB DACs. There's no technical reason, it's all marketing-- internal soundcards are usually marketed to gamers and other know-nothings.

it might not be useless for music producers wanting to load many vst plugins in a DAW.

how many USB DACs? I have 4 free USB ports, is this enough?

One. There is literally no way to combine them or synchronize them, nor do you need to. If you need surround sound, get one with more outputs.

However, if you want improved sound, your first step is to get better speakers or headphones. Then you can start worrying about DACs. DACs are a much smaller improvement than a speaker or headphone upgrade.

What exactly does a sound card do?

Does it have a Sound Processing Unit (SPU) like the graphics card has a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)?

Can we use the SPU for other computational tasks other then processing sound?

>PCIe power connector
>no fans or heatsinks
Something makes me think this card doesn't draw more than 75 watts, and actually need it.

The only thing a sound card would do is transform digital amplitude indicators into a clean raw audio signal, which is surely a very cheap thing to do in hardware these days. Why even purchase a sound card?

Masterrace

It has a DAC and possibly a headphone amplifier built into it. It may also have some hardware to accelerate operations like resampling, mixing, Doppler effects, fake surround sound from stereo, and maybe some 3D sound stuff too. But that stuff is all a gimmick in my opinion, it can be done easily in software without hardware acceleration, and I believe most programs don't bother using the hardware even if it's there.

>What exactly does a sound card do?
It is a DAC
Everything else is done in the driver with recent cards, and most hardware effects like EAX aren't even supported since vista

Barely better than most onboard DACs. Useful in niche situations where you don't need high-end sound and don't have onboard for whatever reason. But it really doesn't measure that well:
nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/behringer-uca202-review.html

If you have it and it fits your needs, awesome, but don't go calling it the master race of DACs, because it's not.

It sounds amazing for the price ($30), definitely cleaner than onboard audio or the few $xxx soundcards I've tried. I don't use the headphone output on it, the line out goes to a 1972 analogue amp.

So what's the point when most PCs come with an audio jack on the motherboard and any amplification would be done by a dedicated system?

The only value I can see to it is to do audio amplification within the PC itself and have that go directly to the surround speakers (or whatever setup is used).

It probably has amps onboard.

>>So what's the point when most PCs come with an audio jack on the motherboard and any amplification would be done by a dedicated system?
There is none if your onboard audio is good enough for you
>The only value I can see to it is to do audio amplification within the PC itself and have that go directly to the surround speakers (or whatever setup is used).
You'd need a large amp for that anyway, a sound card won't be enough

DAC's take the (ideally bit perfect) output from the computer and convert it to analogue, thats it. They usually have slightly higher quality components.

Most onboard sound or sound cards add processing, effects and other bullshit.

In theory, you get a better DAC that way. But like I said, internal sound cards are usually marketed to know-nothings. I know a guy who had an ASUS Xonar and its outputs were noisier than his onboard.

There are legitimate benefits to upgrading your DAC from onboard though. The onboard output on my old computer was so quiet that I had to turn my speaker amp all the way up just to hear dialog in movies, and when that happened my speaker amp would start to get noisy. Fixed it by going to a USB DAC.

Sometimes you can also get motherboard noise (sounds like hissing, clicking, or buzzing) if the electrical circuits around the DAC chip aren't well designed.

And on most laptops, you don't get a proper line out, you just get a headphone out, which is less than ideal for speakers or for headphones that require more amplification than the motherboard provides (double-amping isn't good.)

I use the creative soundblaster audigy fx and I get some crosstalk from my GPU (750ti) during games. But during normal use its fine

The sound the soundcard provides is generally excellent and much louder than my mobo audio, which drives my mdrv6 headphones better.

But there's still that crosstalk issue. Does anyone know a fix for this?

/thread

Yes, get a better card
My ancient Audigy 2 ZS has no such problems

As I've been saying in this thread, get a USB DAC and a headphone amp, they're generally better engineered than internal sound cards. I personally use a Schiit Modi DAC and an Objective 2 amp, but there are cheaper options out there. An O2 is overkill if all you need to drive is an MDR V6.

schiit.com/products/fulla
This might be a good bare minimum amp/DAC combo for you. Should have enough power to drive MDR-V6s okay. I asked someone who owns one, he says it's OK but the volume knob is a little fiddly. You could get around that by using software volume control though.

It's just a card with more ports, it doesn't plug into the motherboard. Like the old live drive breakout boxes, but in the back.

>SLI together sound cards
>shows ASUS card
>implying SLI is up for use by anyone

What dac do you have?
Any dac suggestion everybody?

What's your budget, and what are you going to use it for? Are you sure you even need one? Do you have any of the problems described in (hissing, clicking, buzzing, too quiet, no line out?) If not, you probably don't need a DAC.