New Computer - Advice

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-08-06 05:00)Moving Coil Wrote:  You don't need an external soundcard. The onboard ones are very good in sound quality, you can't hear the difference unless you can hear the difference between a FLAC and a 320kbps mp3. (Which %99.99 people can't) Especially with a high end motherboard. So don't waste your good earned money.

It (presumably) very much depends on the specific onboard sound. I personally haven't had any experience with the modern Realtek ones which are supposedly quite good, however this motherboard has VIA. VIA onboard sound is utter crap. The driver is crap, the sound quality is crap. Anyone that isn't tone deaf would be able to tell the difference between a VIA and a Xonar - I was actually amazed how much better my Xonar DX sounded vs the VIA onboard. Even my ancient Audigy 4 sounded better than the VIA, although the Xonar was noticeably better still.

If you have speakers/amplifier(s) with a digital input, it doesn't really make much difference (except for the audio driver and microphone). However, the amplifier is generally the most important link in the audio chain and if you have an analog amp and crappy preamps in the soundcard it'll sound bad no matter how good your main amp is.


Yes, very few people can tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC, but most people can tell the difference between 128k mp3 and FLAC/CD, even if their ears have been conditioned to prefer the sound of mp3. That's the kind of quality difference (if not greater) between VIA onboard and a Xonar.