Will internal sound cards ever make a comeback?

So i remember when i bought my first soundcard almost 10 years ago dedicated internal soundcards where at their all-time high, manufacturers like asus, emu, rmi and creative where really big in the audio market, almost every enthusiast had one in his system and they were selling insanely well.

2009 was a big year for soundcards, asus with their essence, creative with the fatality and auzentech with their forte cards sold a decent amount over the year but the industry was slowly starting to die

The biggest sign for this was 2013 when auzentech suddenly disappeared from the surface, no more drivers no more support they just closed their doors.

Looking back to those times, now the era of the soundcard is over, mainboard manufacturers and oem chips from realtek have come a huge way and there havent been any major releases from known manufacturers.

I use my essence stx since over 7 years now and i never considered it a bad investment.

What do you think about the history and future of internal soundcards and whats your experience with it?

Other urls found in this thread:

tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733.html
youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733.html

>Using world-class headphones, a $2 Realtek integrated audio codec could not be reliably distinguished from the $2000 Benchmark DAC2 HGC in a four-device round-up. Again, all four devices sounded great.

...

no

The audio dudes like external hardware and the normos don't need anything more than onboard. Sound cards are completely fine products but they don't have much of a market.

fucking audiophiles need to be shot.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

but people will still claim they can hear the difference.

>audiophiles need to be shot
Agreed! But they should be forced to listen to their favourite albums on $5 desktop speakers first.

>mild discomfort intensifies

They only matter to professional musicians dealing with electronic music. It's useless for listening, because the quality of on-board DACs is good enough to be nondistinguishable from dedicated cards.

They're apparently good for recording audio too

Pretty much. There just isn't a lot to be gained by sticking an interface in the PCI-E slot instead of an USB3 port and the outside of the PC is a far nicer place to be in terms of EMI, so internal cards serve a niche few really care for.

>and whats your experience with it?
My brother bought some fancy Asus card a few years ago and I remember he always had a slight hum coming out of his speakers that seemed to increase when the load increased like scrolling down web pages etc.

Only true if the implementation is good, the codecs themselves are all pretty good - but how well it's isolated from the rest of the motheroard is a per-board thing.
That article uses a Asus Rampage III Formula.

The same could not be said about a cheapo $50 mainboard.

I use one for dolby live because my receiver only supports digital surround input. Also I recently put one in a pc I build for a friend because it was cheaper to get an analog surround soundcard + motherboard then a motherboard with analog surround ports.

I'll give you that. That's why I wrote "for listening".

/thread

Dedicated soundcards still make sense if you need ASIO drivers or lots of I/O, but for most people integrated is good enough.

those were the days

youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M

Also most of the best USB DAC use C-Media chips.
C-Media was once upon a time ridiculed for making 'shitty' (8330 was actually awesome) SB16 clones and being used as on-board audio by the likes of PCCHIPS, quite often coupled with a shitty SiS chipset and onboard video.

op your post was shit... you talked nothing about technology and used a bunch of corporate brands and marketing words that mean jack fucking shit

ill cut through all of it and give you a short answer

no

because 2009 there might of been some dsp asics and positional audio codec intelectual property different companies were trying to push

now its all been abstracted and commodified with object audio formats and a few other niches i wont get into (sperical harmonics)

second in terms of sound quality it all down to the power supply and how clean the power quality is and powering off the mobo is just noisy as fuck

thirdly i dont care for sample rate but 24bit depth is the shit, i can hear a vast improvent over dithered and noise shaped 16 bit... 24bit is pretty standard these days wasnt back then

fourthly might of helped with the audio overhead on weak processors back then not so much now

tldr: pci audio cards it was gaymen thing to get gaymin bucks totally divorced from the rest of the audio community - standard aguments not apply - dont nit pick

>powering off the mobo is just noisy as fuck
>24bit depth is the shit, i can hear a vast improvent over dithered and noise shaped 16 bit

(You)

soundblaster cards made all the difference this is from pentium 3 era, had a xonar dx for a long time then stx 2

also considered a great investment even as the onboard audio vastly improved

considering audiophilia price range op amp rolling could be relevant for a comeback but audio will always stay somewhat of a niche market

You're missing one aspect though - Vista.
The removal of true kernel audio killed vidya effects like EAX, so there was no reason to have a one audio processor over another, it was all down to implementation on the board.

Now most every decent motherboard has seperate layers for left and right, isolated grounds, a completely isolated area from the rest of the motherboard, quality caps, etc - there is most nothing an pci/pci-e card could provide that onboard could not outside more ports (and a modern implementation is pushing ~14ch ports at once)

External can provide less interference for silly audiophiles, portability across systems and more ports, but that's about it.

There's little reason. Only good if you need the amplification and don't want external options.

Fuck soundblaster.
>soundblaster cards made all the difference this is from pentium 3 era, had a xonar dx for a long time then stx 2
You don't know what you're talking about kid.

A really good sound card can be had in the range of 100-150bux
Where is the problem? Just buy one if you want one.
I always do.
It's not like I'm paying thousands for pixie dust audiophile bs, its just an audio processor on a board with some amplifiers and usually better grade caps.
Made up stigma imo.

I like my sound card mainly for two reasons
1. The ports emit light, f.e from the headphone one there's green light. Makes it easy to see when it's dark.
2. I've used it on a few mobos, and on a few of them I would get noises when I scrolled or so if I used the onboard sound, never with the dedicated sound card.
It's just PCI though, so I'll probably have to ditch it when I go for AM4... Not sure if I will notice worse sound quality then, don't expect to, but I will miss those lighted ports...

I was a kid back then, aureal tech were the first in 3d positioning, turtle beach montego card then sb came out with sb live and eax then wrote a wrapper for a3d so aureal is the legit innovator if that's what you're referring to

>aureal tech were the first in 3d positioning
They weren't. Rest of you sentence makes no sense.

Pre P4 if you wanted sound period that was't a PC speaker you needed a sound card or midi interface.

I use one because my MoBo's sound is broken.

They have never gone anywhere.

They never were a normie thing.

Wrong.
Plenty of Slot-1 boards had onboard audio.
Pre Late P3/Athlon you needed a NIC though.

Show me a single slot 1 mobo pre 2000 with onboard audio.

The age of the pcie soundcard is over, you're just in time for the age of pcie audio coprocessors.

>faggot namefag
>shit article
Makes sense.
The soundcards arent too popular because people buy external DACs for some reason. Perhaps because of niggers like you telling them shit you have no idea about.

Having a soundcard (20$ XonarDG) is pretty much the same experience as having a DAC but inside the case.

It has enough power to drive high impedance headphones without an AMP
It has WAY LESS noise/interference
Higher power amp provides better lows

Before i got myself a Xonar DG i was suffering bacground noise and realtec piece of shit just couldnt run the headphones loud enogh.
The best 20$ ever spent, no noise, redundant power, higher quality sound reproduction because no nouse and enough piwer for lows.

The only reason you dont have a soundcard is because youre a dumb nig/g/er and listened to other nig/g/ers.

Screencap this post.

Hard to fathom why anyone would use anything but optical out to a separate receiver.

>$900 pcie dongle for your massively overpriced plugins
fuck UAD, seriously

I don't think so. Sound cards used to have a real purpose, the CPU was just too slow to mix multiple sound channels and do other things (run a web browser, a game, etc) at the same time. Integrated sound cards were garbage because all the mixing was done in the driver and you essentially had a single output channel.

But sound hasn't really advanced since then. CPUs have gotten orders of magnitude faster but the workload of sound has remained more or less the same. So everything now is an "integrated sound card," from the integrated sound on your motherboard to the sound on your video card via HDMI. There's just no need for dedicated sound hardware anymore.

is there a reason they disapeared?

I used a Xonar for a long time.

It had really good shielding and was totally noiseless otherwise, as well as nice mic audio quality with it's filtering shenanigans even on a normie-tier headset mic.

The amp was okay and I could knock things off of the cabinets in my neighbor's house without distortion (Good speakers.) but it wasn't really necessary.

9:10 onboard is good enough. Head phone quality can matter quite a bit, though, and obviously the myraid of OS issues (Windows capping max volume, sound enhancements, mic noise, bass/treble imbalances, the entire linux sound subsystem...)

>There's just no need for dedicated sound hardware anymore.

Try and plug some 64 Ohm phones into your shit

To help you out kid since I'm sure nothing is showing up on a google for you. Onboard audio didn't happen till 2000s when the P4 came out. Later P3 mobos had different solutions.

Late k6 mobos had on board audio. Those came out in 98/99 and I think were the first consumer mobos with audio on board.

This excludes proprietary audio cards that some mobos had.

Nah, the plugins are worth it for what they do and at the very least having consistent processing times for everything justifies the cost.

Boom.
It's AT format, so no rear panel outside of 5pin DIN for AT keyboard.
Output is all via headers, but you can see the ESS 1869 in the lower right corner.

...

The soundblaster AE-5 coming in July looks good

lmao what? I can tell the difference with my 200$ headphones. Realtek cant drive them for shit

I don't think so. External DAC/Amps are basically sound cards and not only are they really popular if you look at the battlestation threads here and the subreddits.
They're external of the computer which helps for isolation and can provide a ton of power if they're not USB powered.
That said I think people under estimate onboard audio. I have a gaymen z170 motherboard that I got for $160 and it came with a p400 case. The onboard is superior to my $99 dragonfly black. Absolutely no static or background noise, it's very fucking impressive for motherboard audio.
I see no place for dedicated PCI-E sound cards. It's either good on board or external dac/amp($60-100ish)

music producing user here. some things to note
>music producer of 11 years/12 years of experience
>never heard or cared about flac
>can hear the hear the difference between 128 point sync and 512 point sync and 24bit wav only when comparing
and what i have to say is this. i can tell if i have a good sound card or not, in particular i had some $1000 lenovo ideapad which had great sound, my current pc is a very low end 5-6 year old pc and i hate the sound drivers on it, everything sounds compressed to death like there is no room for sound, and wonky in general, all of my external windows and internal daw settings are where they should be but it still sounds like trash.
long story short there is definetely a difference and i feel like bad sound cards/drivers will increase ear fatigue by a huge margin

I'm thinking a good use for soundcards these days would be for dedicated media players that hook to some outlandish sound system. I dunno, I'm just rambling.

Ya that needs a proprietary card...

this

Not worth the price, don't buy those meme shits.
You can literally use a FPGA or DSP.

No, it doesn't kiddo.

>tfw I have one of those soundcards in my PC RIGHT NOW

My only regret is that Auzentech went bankrupt and now I have to go and look for a custom driver on an obscure website to get it working properly. I think it's still missing some functionality without the official software, though it's not like I ever used that in the first place.
I never considered it a bad investment either, though it is completely overkill for my needs. I could just as well have gone with something cheaper and really have gotten the same out of it since I run S-PDIF from it into my AV receiver, but most of the cheaper (and even most of the more expensive) options at the time were all PCI based.
Since PCI is just about gone now, having a PCI-e card with the connectivity options I need is nice.

Of course, futureproofing isn't why I bought it back then. I just needed the digital output and chose the Bravura because I was young and dumb, had money to spend, and I found it looked nicer than the rest. Still nice to have though, S-PDIF is still found on very few motherboards even today. At least it's not something I want to specifically choose my next motherboard by.

>Not worth the price.
>Accurately replaces hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of vintage gear.
Have you even touched an 1176 in your entire life?

You may want to read the manual kiddo.

It's a meme since other hardware can do the same shit, but also do other functions.

It's literally a Console vs. PC type argument.
You are advocating locked down proprietary single use hardware.
The other poster is advocating you just do the same with commodity FPGAs.

t. underage fag

Early PC motherboards didn't have audio at all and it's only in the last 5-10 years that onboard audio has started to be good. Before that, soundcards were pretty much a requirement if you wanted decent audio.

You might want to...
The mainboard has an ESS1869 onboard.
I know this, not just from looking at it but owning a PCCHIPs mainboard with a Celeron 333.
Not that board, I had a 440BX chipset with an onboard SiS6326AGP.
>As an aside that CPU was pretty good at 450mhz.

yeah, even in 2005 most onboard audio was still shit. there were massive improvements in onboard sound quality in the last decade. now if you don't have decent headphones or speakers you can use onboard and not tell the difference. if you get something that needs a lot of power to drive or is just really good, then you can get a benefit with a sound card or external DAC.

yeah, i'm not sure how this test was conducted, but this sounds bad af. there is a noticeable difference between onboard sound and offboard with even an $100 pair of headphones (ATH-M50), even on a computer built in December 2016 (e.g. modern mobo).

You need proprietary shit for it. A single or even handful of obscure mobos doesn't change the fact that as a whole no slot 1 mobo has on board sound till the 2000s

>currency ($) after the vlaue
> bad af
The test was done by people who aren't 12 years old.

>somebody makes a single typo
>LOL YOU'RE 12
cool ad hominem bro
Toms is relatively shit as a review site. they even concede on the last page that the realtek is only "near-fi". I don't know how they can make the claim that the audio codec couldn't be "reliably distinguished". they admit that the testing methodology had issues on volume levels for the realtek at different point which was corrected mid-test, invalidating all of the results.

again, I think that onboard sound has come a tremendous way, and most people aren't going to notice a difference. but with the right headphones or speakers and sufficient quality media (which I would concede the track types listed by Toms appear to be), it should be easy to distinguish.

and I'm not a "cable risers" guy who thinks you should get $1,000 cables farted on by pixies. I think you can spend less than $100 on a soundcard and get massive improvement and anything beyond that is incremental, just like I think ~$100 is the bang for the buck on headphones.

but I think tom's methodology of playing "try to guess the chip" is a distraction. they should have done different runs and then just asked notes on the audio quality.

the biggest flaw (which toms admits) is that they did not test low impedance headphones, which integrated sound is going to have an extremely difficult time driving.

Is it your phone that makes your sentence structure like that or do you have some mental condition?

Any AV receiver made in the last decade has HDMI or at least optical input that works perfectly with any GPU or integrated sound card

You don't understand, pleb. My ears have developed a range of hearing beyond the average mortal. OF COURSE if you just let some random nobodies try to tell the difference, their inferior aural palate won't be able to discern the difference. Such is the blessing and the curse of the audiophile.

Different people do actually have different hearing ranges.

are you going to discuss the subject or just keep proving you wish it would rain cocks right into your mouth

If you'd like to discuss the topic in a format that isn't eye cancer sure.

ok patch together an RFC for what you quantify isnt eye cancer on Sup Forums and we'll all just keep talking while you fuck off

Naturally. And it just so happens to be those who spend the most money on audio equipment have the best hearing.

I think someone needs to consult with an otorhinolaryngologist.

Still using a C-media 8738
it sucks on Linux distros but the integrated ones aren't better either.

Would appreciate some recommendation if someone knows a soundcard which works properly(and filters low-frequency for 5.1 speakers without hacking configs)

This

I'm not saying that, I'm saying 2 different people will have 2 different frequency response curves.

Nope, the era of internal sound cards is pretty much over.

External DACs are the future. Thunderbolt removes the latency issues with USB.

>onboard audio didn't happen until the 2000s

u wot m8

I had a Pentium MMX system in 1996 with unbelievably shitty c-media audio on the motherboard that would buzz whenever I moved the mouse.

Niger even socket 5 systems with onboard were a common thing in the mid to late 90s

if you are a "music producer" you wouldnt take some shitty laptop audio with 1hr latency so btfo...

ya but let's say consuming media is the only reason you want a better audio solution than onboard there is literally no reason to take a external dac if there are shielded internal solutions that can basically output the same quality without taking up space on the desk or somewhere else?

The essence stx is a perfect example, the shield does an awesome job at negating noise and jitter and honestly equipped with LME49720 i haven't heard a better external dac in the same price range.

In the external case you could also use spdif instead of thunderbolt

>common
Ok kiddos/

>t. underage fag
How ironic, considering you look like a underage fag now.

No, sound cards where never a normie thing, someone with a 486 probably didn't play with it or even know it deeply enough to get or have a sound card for it.
Someone who already built their own computer and knew how it worked and played on it, wasn't a normie.
For a slight time you could get a pre build with a sound card, but mostly normies got used to sound on their computers when they started coming on board.

Holy shit you're dumb as fuck.
It made me cringe and laugh so hard.

>t. 16 year old
you are like the autistic fucks in /vr/ who think and act they are wintel gods but actually they don't know shit

>No, sound cards where never a normie thing
Not him but you seem to be ignorant that you needed a dvd decoder or if you had a fast CPU it was still highly recommended. Was probably the main reason the Live cards sold so well.
>normie
>cringe
>t.
>wintel
K, kids.

Mobos have better dacs but I don't think having a dedicated high quality dac card to be bad. It's not like this shit is super expensive. I have one sb zx I paid 100$ years ago and I keep carrying it to new builds. My live card survived till w7 from p3

Exactly. It's not a monster price tag, they can last 4-5 years til no more drivers, and you end with better dacs and amp.
Sometime I will try the integrated dac on my Mobo never really tried it, my card is 4 years old.

> ear fatigue by a huge margin
Agree with that. Probably the reason is phase distotion on low-level sound cards.

>common
Yes, like in every poverty pre-built, which was the majority of sales.

>calling everyone kids while fabricating history he knows nothing about
Spotted the actual child. You're probably the same fag that was butthurt about the gotek floppy emulator on vr like a week ago.

Oh hey it's the paki who has a the massive hate boner against gotek. Small world.

Pretty sure it was compensating alternate history kid that was mad about the gotek

>thinking wintel or normie are kid terms
I got some bad news for you Mr.I'mAoldFagRlly-but-IuseKidUnIronically

Ya you. I brought up how a gotek was useful for booting win98 from a usb and you lost your shit and rent on a rant about it being terrible.

He's not me, faggot. You really are an idiot.
I also never said I hate Gotek, I said for 99% of use cases it's useless.

We also all know how you throw around "kid" unironically, really makes one think.
>inb4 he's an autistic 45 year old faggot with no life or a teen with autism

We love making fun of you, but please, stick to /vr/, it's the autism containment board.

Ok kid. Just ignore that 99% of prebuilds had some kind of sound card.

>He thinks you can't use 3 sound cards on anything newer then a 486
>He dosen't know about Slot 1 motherboards and how common on board audio was with those

Topkek.
Did you also see the Vogons thread about your retardation, even Phil posted.

>$2
>integrated

What? How does it have an individual price if it's integrated? Or do they mean from the manufacturer, in which case even high end DACs use $4 DAC chips

I haven't said anything about sound cards or pre builds. I literary lurked until I saw your post about "Gotek hate" and knew you though it was actually me.
It must be hard living with autism, I also see I hit a nail on the head with something I said how you went all pussy and quiet. Sorry.

>topkek
Oh no... this kid again.
>Did you also see the Vogons thread about your retardation, even Phil posted.
Do give a link so I can screencap there retardation. You're probably just making shit up though.

Man you're stalking for me. Pretty funny kid.

>>topkek
>Oh no... this kid again.
>on Sup Forums
>doesn't use topkek
Pls user