So, as mentioned in other threads I'm going to build a new PC and I'll probably need a new internal PCIe soundcard for it.
My old soundcard is a ASUS Xonar DX and I used to have a 5.1 soundsystem connected to it. But, since I moved a while ago I prefer to use my Beyerdynamic DT 770 80 Ohm headphones, because I don't want to disturb my neighbours when gaming.
But as the Xonar DX is missing a headphone amplifier, I was wondering which soundcard you'd recommend? From an audio point of view, I use my PC for gaming and listening to music. These are the ones I have looked up, but I'm open to suggestions:
But any Strix card could be fine, since the cheapest is available for around 85€, while the most expensive (DLC) costs 190€. A price range where I could consider an Essence card as well:
In the end, I certainly don't need the best product available and from a financial point of view, something around 100€ would be nice, but I'd like to hear your thoughts...
If your motherboard has a digital audio out and a good built in sound card (which most higher end boards do now)... There is really no point to a sound card unless you legitimately need the various connections for a surround setup.
(For reference, one of these connections is what I mean by digital audio)
Since I'm planning to build a Ryzen X370 system I don't actually have a motherboard right now. My old motherboard is an ASRock z68 which uses a Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec and I noticed a huge difference when I got my ASUS Xonar DX. That being said, this was in 2012. Are onboard soundchips now considerably better?
They are good enough now to not warrant buying a sound card. At least if you use the above digital audio cord which eliminates all wierd issues like any interference, etc. And most surround sound boxes have a digital audio in.
Even the normal audio connections are a ton better. As long as you get a motherboard with the separate audio PCB and etc, Which is most of them.
The audio on an old z68 board is such cheap junk lol, that was before mobo makers realised audio was a thing.
Ok thats good to know, since I'm going to spend more money on my board (Taichi maybe? - it also has a headphone amp :-) ) i should probably test it first. As mentioned above, I don't really need a digital audio in since I'm almost exclusively using my headphones.
Another reason to use onboard sound would be that many Strix owner complain about some random noise while gaming.
Yeah, modern integrated audio is rather good. I'd try out the integrated audio on whichever motherboard you choose first, no sense in buying something extra when you will already have something that will work.
Nearly any external recording interface is better quality and value than any of the options you presented. These will not give you a significant increase in audio quality over what your motherboard likely has built in.
DACs aren't necessarily great for the money either. Hardware-wise you'll find the same (or often better) op-amps, better gain stages/DSP and isolation in recording interfaces over all in one PC marketed and focused DACs
depending on your budget I'd go with one of these:
Thanks for the links, but as @Cavemanthe0ne and @w.meri have mentioned, it is probably better to test the onboard sound solution first, considering my mainboard isn't going to be cheap to begin with and considering that they've gooten better than at the time I was testing them last.
If you're using high impedance headphones, or do a lot of recording/VoIP, then onboard is almost never ideal.
The reason internal sound cards typically aren't worth it is because they have poor or effectively no isolation from the other (very electronically noisy) components, so no matter what kind of voodoo and high quality components you put on the board (though they, for the most part, are populated with second tier parts to garbage) the analog stage will always suffer, and end up sounding the same as the onboard audio.
You also aren't going to get clean power delivery like you can with a standalone solution unless you want to put a GPU power header on your sound card, (which no one will use, so the ODMs don't).
You can still see plenty of benefit from an esternal recording interface, and you also get huge cable routing neatness advantages.
I agree, I still haven't found an onboard (at least one made by Realtek) that sounded OK when doing recording. I don't use optical out myself, so those built in boards usually have a perceptible hum from their analog ports. I'm still using a very old Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card on my system, and it sounds great. Too bad the mic isn't supported in linux and I have to use the cruddy internal sound.
Impedance is only one part of how easy or hard it is to drive headphones, another major factor being sensitivity. A pair of headphones can have super high impedance, but if it's also hyper-efficient it could easily be easier to drive than headphones with a low impedance and exceptionally low sensitivity. Headphones like the Hifiman HE-6 may be "only" 50 ohms, but they are very inefficient, meaning they will need a crazy amount of power to drive (447 mW for 110dB) even compared to 600 Ohm DT880s (43 mW for 110dB).
I will agree that internal soundcards are more or less pointless nowadays, but really because integrated audio is so much better nowadays than it used to be. Integrated audio used to sound like tin cans being dragged through dog shit, but now many motherboards have DACs built in with very low noise and amplifier sections with much better op amps. I'll admit, I'm one of the people that have shit on Realtek in the past (and still do for NICs), but their latest audio codecs are very capable chips with rather low noise, and combined with a decent op amp have good quality.
I was presenting this information (incomplete a subset as it was) as concisely as possible, because the many intricacies of audio aren't relevant to the average person's use cases.
Also, I never said that integrated audio wasn't "Good enough," but I do recording week to week on several different modern, high end systems, an not a single one comes close to interface quality for anything demanding. It's nice to be able to plop a tascam or scarlett on any system and know approximately how it's going to sound.
Said it before, audio interfaces like the mentioned focusrite have limited capabilities when it comes to hard to drive headphones. I actually have the 2i2 first gen. here and to get HD650s loud, you have to max it out. That is never a good thing and you can hear it. The DAC is great, so if you have active speakers running that is totally fine. For demanding headphones better get something like a Fiio E09K on the cheap or something class A used to end it all.
