Who Needs a Sound Card, Anyway? | Hacker News Reader

Who Needs a Sound Card, Anyway?

codinghorror.com

17 pointsalexgartrell10 comments

Seeing as the word "latency" doesn't make an appearance anywhere on the page, I'm assuming anyone doing audio work will still benefit from a decent card. (Why? Because when you hit a key on your midi keyboard/drums, and want it to be like playing a piano/drumkit, you want the minimum latency before you hear the note so it feels more like the real thing)

You will most certainly want a real audio interface for doing audio production. Latency is one reason, but they also provide multiple simultaneous inputs, better analog to digital converters, and the good ones provide decent mic preamps.

If you wanna get pedantic, he did say that the exception is people who invested in quality headphones, and if you're doing audio work, that exception probably covers you. I suppose there is a set of such people who only have high-quality speakers and no quality headphones, but now we're really picking nits.

It's a nit worth picking; I am ever-so-slightly hearing-impaired (congenital) to the point where I only need the $80 Bose headphones instead of the $300 imported-from-Europe headphones for my audio work, and motherboard sound cards are fine for quality but horrid for latency.

Everybody's got their own needs. :3

Many people doing serious audio work use Firewire interfaces. PCIe cards are certainly still used, moreso with higher-end setups. I've seen setups that can get around 4ms of round-trip latency, which is quite impressive.

Right now I run my sound through a MOTU Ultralite, and I've got some Grados SR60s and Audio Technica ATH-M40fs, which combined cost me under $100 (used and on sale... but you can still get each pair for ~$60 - $70), as well as some rebranded Altec Lansing UHP336. (Other headphones I've owned include the MDR-7506 and DT-770s, and I've frequently used older sets of K240s and HD-280s)

That being said, I think the notion that you need $300 head phones + $200 in headphone amplification is absolute garbage. $60 in headphones will get you 80% of the way. My macbooks and my Thinkpads have had more than adequate drive for my headphones, but there's still a small difference when you are driving it with something like a MOTU/digidesign/whatever interface. Most the interfaces I've used were as good or better than the midrange stuff when it came to headphone amplification.

One thing I've noticed is that most DIY PCs tend to have much crappier noise performance than my laptops, and the problem is always a million times worse if you use the front panel audio jack. Not sure why, maybe that's why this guy wrote this article.

Huh, what is this 'soundcard' thing he's talking about...

I haven't used a soundcard for more than 5 years. The last soundcard I bought was an SB AWE128, which I think was something like 10 years ago... After that, the motherboard integrated sound became pretty OK, at least for games and mp3 consumption, and from what I heard the SB cards were no longer getting better.

Sure, if you're a musician you might have other requirements. Or if you invest in quality headphones and quality music files (not lousy old mp3s :).

I used a bithead on my computer with good headphones and FLAC/Apple Lossless files and it was nice, both linux and windows recognized the bithead right away but once that broke my headphones just got plugged in straight to the computer and the amplification isn't really a factor and not enough difference is head by my ears to make me go out and buy another bithead.

Soundblaster is pretty awful now, plus it doesn't even work on linux but my last card was a soundblaster as well probably around '05.

Several points which don't flow well into paragraphs:

1) On-board sound isn't very good, in my experience. Admittedly, my 2006 Macbook sounds considerably better than my 2010 Toshiba.

2) My favorite headphones are the Etymotic ER-4P. I found mine online for a bit under $200. They're an almost perfect aural match for my beloved NHT 2.5i speakers.

3) The Boostaroo is a horrible amp. Unbelievable hiss and distortion. I don't know how they're still in business. If you need a portable amp, look for a CMOY in an Altoids tin, off eBay. Cheap and (IMO) vastly superior.

4) A computer's case is about the worst environment I can think of for audio electronics. Get any sound card which gives a digital out, and feed that into any consumer-grade receiver that supports digital decoding, like a Pioneer from Costco. This way, your uncorrupted digital stream gets converted to analog well away from the noisy PC case. You'll be 90% of the way to a ultra-high dollar sound for a couple hundred bucks.

I totally agree with your points 1 and 4. Ofcourse your processor can calculate sound, but it's the AC that is important. When I plug in my headphones in my onboard soundcard and move my mouse I'm hearing noise and hiss. When I play music I can hardly hear it, but it's there and you will notice it when the music is soft.

Need great sound: get the digital signal out of your PC and have an AC outside your hardware.

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