If that's what you interpreted from what I said, then yes it is.
I was just having a go at how it kinda sounded (to me anyways) that some people might need positional audio in order to be any good at all. In multiplayer games I'll be listening to music most of the time anyway and I've never noticed any difference in how good or bad I am with or without music.
(V-sync usually fixes what it needs to fix for me, with no drawbacks as input lag is not an issue here. I can tell absolutely no difference between V-sync on or off in pretty much every game so far in terms of lag.)
People defend their investments and don't want to look like morons for investing in a lot of well marketed hardware.
Fact is that almost all consumer grade soundcards are a total waste of money.
The ODAC, if it's made after the (not really "open source") creative commons design by the dude that designed the Objective2 amp, uses the ESS DAC chip that is also used in the relatively cheap ESS sound cards that are available through music stores, one of which I have recommended on this forum in the past.
The reason why I recommended that (home studio orientated) sound card, is because it contains: 1. the ESS DAC that is class compliant (driverless operation in Windows, linux and OSX, will also work with ASIO in windows through ASIO4ALL, which is freeware); 2. the Creative DSP of which the driver code has been merged with the linux kernel, is open sourced by Creative, and the Windows drivers, although not open source, are actually pretty stable (since the code was open sourced in 2008 or so, a lot of work has been done on it by the community), which caters for those applications where a DSP can come in handy (for instance for doing some patchwork on crappy MP3's, or for recording musicians to offload some plug-ins to the DSP instead of the CPU, or for EAX in Windows games or OpenAL for AMD TrueAudio); 3. it contains a pretty decent pre-amp with big caps and a good PCB design, balanced line-in/out connectors, and a pretty decent headphone amp. All of that for a good 100 bucks. I do agree that an external solution would be better than a PCIe solution for most users.
The reality is that the Objective2 headphone amp is a really cool device, because it's powered by a couple of 9V batteries, providing pure, isolated 18V DC power, which provides superior dynamics. The ESS soundcard I've linked to in the past, uses a voltage doubler for 20-24 V operation, but obviously it's not as clean power as batteries, because it draws power from the PC. But the truth is that most users will not have a use case scenario whereby they will be able to discern the difference, because they will use less expensive headphones or speakers, and the content they listen to is often over-compressed and not very audio-quality-critical.
I agree with everything you said in your video, a thousandfold, however, I do think that there are honest soundcard products, not by Asus or the likes, those are just the vilest marketing crap, but by pro audio manufacturers, that don't sell their products through the PC hardware channels, but through music stores and pro audio channels. I do agree though that as soon as it needs a driver, it's crap, class compliant USB is definitely the way to go. All those guys that bought even expensive sound card stuff in XP times have all had to throw them away, because Microsoft has made them incompatible with EVERY iteration of Windows NT since then.
Other hardware things that are really cool for some users and that I recommend: the Digitech RP line of guitar preamps: they are class compliant, there is a community based open source preset management software available, the firmwares have been open sourced and improved, and the emulation/models are pretty decent, and it's very low priced and full metal high quality stuff, and includes Lexicon reverb and delay effects. The only point of criticism that I have is the relatively bad quality of some footswitches, but the units are very easy to service and a momentary vacuum cleaner stomp switch costs next to nothing, and everyone has hotglue and a drill and a soldering iron. For guitarists, this is a good all-in solution: they have great models for recording and practice, it works on all platforms, and it's a great external sound card, all in the same device that costs between like 50 to 200 bucks, depending on the model and the features. I myself use an RP255 (which is about 120 USD or so) with an Asus EeePC running Fedora 20 Creative (with Ardour) for mobile production work. It's been a solid solutions for doing quick sessions and fills on-the-go for 4 years or so now. I have other solutions, some of them much more expensive, so I can compare. I'm not saying that I'm going to use it for leads on a commercial recording, because I never will, for that I really use a real tube amp and a combination of dynamic, condenser and ribbon mics into some high end strips, but half of every fill or background track I've recorded in the last 4 years or so, was just a quick fix on the RP255 and EeePC in a spare moment.
The Objective2 amp is great, it's the best headphone amp that can also be used for mobile listening. There are better amp solutions depending on the use case scenario, but none involve gaming marketing, Asus, or another PC hardware manufacturer.
Again I feel you missed the point, the attack on sound cards is purely about impedance mismatch. which is a real thing, I can hear it, measure it and it varies with both headphones and amps. No one has said that a sound card is worse than onboard due to anything other than impedance. Most reasonable people are arguing that up until the headphone amp, the difference between onboard and a sound card is negligible. You might find features on a sound card that are not supported with some onboard but SQ is not one of them. If you are using line out, speakers or a digital out (which bypasses the dacs anyway) then there is no sq improvement from buying a sound card. If you are using headphones then the impedance of the amp matters and usually with sound cards this is too high for majority of headphones on the market.
If you are using stereo headphones then the only surround you can have is binaural so the whole dolby argument is moot, dolby digital surround is all meaningless if the signal is not binaural.
I use my TV's speakers most of the time.. Other times, I use a $70 set of surround speakers, in stereo mode.
>Where is your God now?
Never had one. Mwhuhuhhuhahahhahahahaahhaha.
OH YOU SILLY BANANA.
Roger Waters - "the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not"
The audio equipment industry is so annoying.%90 of the customers and compaines have the apple mentality.
"audiophiles" with unnneeded and overpriced hi-fi eqipment
"musicans" with overpriced instruments,amps and effects that sound about the same as reasonably priced ones
Studios with overly complex and overpriced recording gear.
Just buy decent stuff that suits you.No need to buy stuff thats maybe %5 better for %500 more money.
Exactly, I listen to my music on shure se210 and it's decent and affordable.
While I can't speak for the audiophiles I agree with you on the musicians. Especially, guitarists and their "boutique" pedals. Although some mods like Rg keen mods genuinely improve the tone, most the pedals out in the market promise sonic heaven and make a tone that is marginally better than a comparable Boss pedal. Same goes for guitars with "exotic" woods and deluxe, custom shop crap stickers. Gibson, the apple of guitar industry. But that's another story..
+1
Example of doing everything wrong: a single coil guitar (works like an antenna to all kinds of interference), into a coil cable (loads down the pickups, loss of audio quality), into a fuzzbox with in input impedance of 400 kOhm (loads down the pickups, loss of audio quality, and the fuzz effect compresses and distorts the audio), into a 50 foot instrument cable (again loss of audio quality), into a cranked tube amp (power tube distortion, degraded valves, trannies that eat up a lot of the audio quality), into a non-optimized and free resonating cabinet that contains 4 very efficient speakers that however have a very irregular frequency response curve and a very limited travel, and with the power of the valve amp, the very thin cones (which makes the speakers efficient) can flex freely... that's what Jimi Hendrix used, he basically did everything wrong according to "audiophile" standards lolz...
I was gonna jump on this comment then I read the last sentence :3
Yeah hahaha, but it's true though, once you hit those 7000+ hours of practice, you just don't want to deal with gear any more. I've made all the mistakes, I've bought rack effects, boutique amps, expensive custom guitars, tens of thousands of dollars worth of useless crap, until I learned how to play. Now I barely use effects, barely ever switch channels, barely ever touch any know except for the volume and tone control on my guitar. All the gear crap just deviates from what it's all about, and the more knobs, the less time to play...
These days I mostly play on a beat up hacked up frankencaster that I made myself and that I really like, no effects, straight into a heavily modded Orange TTCombo, mic'd up with a simple e906, with a simple slighly modulated analogue delay in the insert on the console. I do use several types of plectra to get different sounds, but everything else is just playing and guitar volume/tone pots. Does everything I need it to do. My bigger rigs are for broadcast and function only these days, I'm just so tired of dealing with gear, it gets in the way of making music. Most important part of a guitarist's rig are the musicians' ear plugs...
I get the point that all of you are trying to make, but audiophile grade things arent useless like you're suggesting.
Compare it to a PC, in general. You dont need a stylish case, and you dont need to overclock. But we buy liquid cooling, we buy fancy cases and lights. We spend hours making our PC's look amazing and using watercooling and special fans. I know Ive spent hundreds of dollars that I didnt need to. So just let them have their thing ;).
but the question is would you spend the extra cash making your pc look amazing if it reduced the performance? that is the issue with some of these high end cards, they actually reduce the audio quality. So it is not so much about swag or flashy gear, but about compromises, features versus quality, and why people need to be better informed about what they are actually buying.
"I'd say he would to well to get the hell off of head-fi and go read some better info on a better website."
If your goal is to dispel the myths and misinformation, you should direct us to this "better info on a better website."
This isn't a criticism. I feel that when you suggest there's better info out there, offering up specifics like a particular website, article, or forum gives the community something to work off of. Sure, it opens you up for more criticism-"That site is shite!", etc. but that's unavoidable. It also motivates you to really scrutinize the sources, cross check them against other points of view, and come to a reasonable consensus.
I have a BA in journalism. I'm not bragging. I never used the degree for employment, but the courses taught me methods of filtering sources, and how to effectively provide info even when I'm not an expert on a subject.
You need a graphics card to run graphics software, you don't need a soundcard to run sound software.
:D
and I m not sure suddenly why sound cards are getting a bad rep.. these days some people also spending ridiculous amount of money for mechanical keyboards, gaming mouse and many pc peripherals.. there are also people who willing to spend $1000 for gtx titan to gain some few fps instead of getting something like gtx 780 for $500.. and some people upgrading their cpu/mobo every generation to get that tiny performance boost ... and I personally know a few persons who hate audiophile equipments and upgraded their ivy bridge system to Haswell by spending over $1000s.. and the performance difference is also not even noticeable. and some of them have over $400 extreme mobos and doesn't even know anything about overclocking too...
WOAH MAN! Let's not crush all their dreams all at once now! Baby steps!
To sum this all up:
If you like fancy DSP's, get a sound card.
If you don't want fancy DSP's, onboard audio or an external dac are probably your best bet.