Good Sound Card for gaming these days....

Even fancy new games with 100+ audio channels are using 128Kbps audio. It just doesn't matter when it's sound effects, and the quality of a soundtrack in the actual game itself is almost irrelevant when sound effects are layered on top of it.

Look through the game files. I almost challenge you to find something above 256Kbkps VBR. Even that is a stretch. You won't find lossless anything anywhere.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

There is no difference. We are talking about video games. The soundtracks are 256Kbps VBR on a good day. The sound effects are just sound effects. The sound of a sniper rifle isn't going to sound any different.

It's a wonder that Creative is still making sound cards. A of SNR 124dB is pretty irrelevant as a statistics. The Sound Blaster brand is a joke designed to sell a dead product to chumps. For a while it still made sense after the dedicated sound card was made redundant, because the I/O was still useful… but now there are better I/O solutions as well. Almost all I/O has gone external. They started putting things like an amp on the sound card because they had to find someway to continue to sell a 5 year old worthless product.

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I guess you should go and ask Asus and Gigabyte , why are they taking the same route , adding 118dB SNR sound onboard , including the 600 ohm just one year after Creative and Asus introduced similar sound cards.

it is not a 5 years old worthless product. and you can hear the difference. you are talking technical ... we are talking from Experience ... and I dont think the motherboard makers are stupid to make their high end motherboards $100 more expensive just for worthless product as you have said.

maybe you never tried a really expensive headphones to feel the difference .... I dont know..

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Originally Posted by PCVSNotebook

I guess you should go and ask Asus and Gigabyte , why are they taking the same route , adding 118dB SNR sound onboard , including the 600 ohm just one year after Creative and Asus introduced similar sound cards.

it is not a 5 years old worthless product. and you can hear the difference. you are talking technical ... we are talking from Experience ... and I dont think the motherboard makers are stupid to make their high end motherboards $100 more expensive just for worthless product as you have said.

maybe you never tried a really expensive headphones to feel the difference .... I dont know..

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They are making them $5 more expensive and then charging you a $95 premium.

You aren't going to get better audio out of SoundBlaster board than you will out of an Intel Desktop reference board. It's going to sound exactly the same. It's just marketing ******** the same way TV manufacturers now make outrageous claims like, "1200Hz" or some other nonsense.

If you really want/need higher quality audio you use the S/PDIF output and pipe it into a real audio system. There was a period of time when games even supported this. Then everyone realized that it was kind of worthless to pipe 64Kbps audio channels into a fancy Dolby hardware decoder.

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Originally Posted by PCVSNotebook

I guess you should go and ask Asus and Gigabyte , why are they taking the same route , adding 118dB SNR sound onboard , including the 600 ohm just one year after Creative and Asus introduced similar sound cards.

it is not a 5 years old worthless product. and you can hear the difference. you are talking technical ... we are talking from Experience ... and I dont think the motherboard makers are stupid to make their high end motherboards $100 more expensive just for worthless product as you have said.

maybe you never tried a really expensive headphones to feel the difference .... I dont know..

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Sure, good headphones matter A LOT. Especially when compared to pack-in computer speakers. There is no comparison. We are talking about the sound card's effect on this, not the physical driver. The point is, the ship has already sailed on quality when the dev encoded the track to 128Kbps. A cheap bundled sound card won't make that worse. Physical drivers matter a lot, because most simply can't represent the entire frequency range.

If we are talking lossless through an audiophile sound system with a VERY discerning ear, then there will be some difference. The OP needs to ask themselves if it is worth $300 for a sound card and $5000 for an entry level audiophile sound system.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

They are making them $5 more expensive and then charging you a $95 premium.

You aren't going to get better audio out of SoundBlaster board than you will out of an Intel Desktop reference board. It's going to sound exactly the same. It's just marketing ******** the same way TV manufacturers now make outrageous claims like, "1200Hz" or some other nonsense.

If you really want/need higher quality audio you use the S/PDIF output and pipe it into a real audio system. There was a period of time when games even supported this. Then everyone realized that it was kind of worthless to pipe 64Kbps audio channels into a fancy Dolby hardware decoder.

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well as I said I am talking from experience. I compared the onboard sound with my card using my EARS , and it is way better.

as for using the digital out , I agree , but there is a minus here , when you move your pc around you will need to move your HUGE sound system with it. and this is not practical . I want it all in the box .