New Computer - Advice

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-08-06 18:27)Moving Coil Wrote:  I don't think the VIA ones are that bad man. That kind of high end motherboard should have a very decent audio chip on it. Whats wrong with the driver?
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But i'm just guessing, I don't have any experience with that card or with a VIA card. I have just compared the sound quality between my onboard Realtek soundcards sound vs my t.c. electronic konnekt 24D

Then don't talk about what you don't know

For the record, this isn't a high end motherboard. It may have a fairly expensive Intel chipset in it, but it's not even a high end one. You can't even do proper Crossfire/SLI on it - don't be fooled by the 2 PCI-E 16x sized slots, one of them only runs at 4x and can't be used at the same time as the 1x slots because the bus is shared.
The higher quality ones tend to have Realtek Sound and Network - this has VIA and Atheros respectively.
I'm not saying it's a bad motherboard, it's decent, just not high end by any means.

As you say, (and what I've generally heard agrees with it) the modern Realtek onboard audio is pretty damn good. VIA's, however, aren't. I've had a fair bit of experience with VIA stuff, not just audio, and it's all cheap and either low quality or cuts corners.
As for the driver, mine had a wide variety of things either wrong, broken or retarded going on.
A prime example is what it did to my microphone most times I tried to use it: http://soundcloud.com/lamp-1-1/tc-ts-elmo-exterminate


As for my perception of audio quality in general, I'm not an audiophile. I'm not going to go buying gold plated toslink cables or £500/metre speaker cable - that crap isn't fooling me.
However, I do know good equipment/mastering when I hear it. I did a fair amount of audio engineering while at Uni, plus helping out with some major touring bands' engineers and techs. I've heard a wide variety of good (and bad) quality equipment.

I haven't got any fancy signal analysing hardware, so I can't personally compare the frequency response of the various sound cards I have any way other than subjectively, however I've seen tests online:

Spoiler (Click to View)

Doesn't look like they're messing with the sound to me.

Ed: Boosting the bass and treble is probably sometimes done in an attempt to mask the shortcomings of some cheap amplifiers, which tend to drop off at the extremes of their frequency range - that and some people actually like having very little mid for some reason (boy racer car stereos, I'm looking at you).