Paying More than $2 for a Sound Card Is Not Worth It

opposite is also true. as you dont need to know the science to enjoy music.
 
Unless your integrated sound solution is downright flawed and you have a basic hifi amplifier (T-amps are a hit and miss, some models are actually passable), you'll be best served to invest into speakers up to the point where you have at least 2000 bucks a pair level set. After that you may (or may not) start to hear meaningful differences between amps and dacs. Even at this level, shell another 2000 bucks more to speakers and you'll hear ten or a thousand fold higher quantitive or qualititive differences in produced sound, compared to switching DACs or amps.
 
genkifd said:
opposite is also true. as you dont need to know the science to enjoy music.
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That in itself is true, but in this case, there is no valid reason to actually attack the science just because you "don't believe in it." Again, a bunch of these people are pretty much denying that the Earth is spherical. If you don't understand the science and don't want to, go ahead and enjoy your stuff, but don't go telling people the science is wrong (without providing any useful information) and that other people need to buy the same overpriced stuff they don't need in order to get a good quality of sound.

If you're content in ignorance, keep it to yourself. Ignorance isn't something you should be trying to teach other people.
 
A recent review in a hi-fi magazine compared DACs ranging from 150 euros to 2500 euros. They included a vanilla 2013 Macbook pro in the blind tests.

According to the measurements and blind testing the Macbook Pro was found comparable to the best DACs and beat the average ones. It failed only with difficult headphone loads.
 
B00nie said:
A recent review in a hi-fi magazine compared DACs ranging from 150 euros to 2500 euros. They included a vanilla 2013 Macbook pro in the blind tests.

According to the measurements and blind testing the Macbook Pro was found comparable to the best DACs and beat the average ones. It failed only with difficult headphone loads.
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The obviously didn't test too hard. The grounding on the headphone jack on Apple hardware has blown ass for years now.
 
Skripka said:
The obviously didn't test too hard. The grounding on the headphone jack on Apple hardware has blown ass for years now.
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And you have a late 2013 Macbook pro? I do. And the headphone output has worked perfectly also in the previous generations so I don't know where you pull that story :)
 
Nenu said:
I dont care to give you scientific explanations, I did my own testing, drew my own conclusions and made my own cables and it worked out very well.
If I was to say I did somethying else then I wouldnt be telling the truth.
Perhaps you prefer that or would rather not hear peoples experience :rolleyes:

If you cant tell the difference, dont blame me.
I agree that there is plenty of snake oil out there and I'm not partial to it either.
But not everyone can perceive really fine detail and even less seem to care even when they can hear it.
It took me a long time to work my way up to the equipment I have now because I wasnt sure if it was worth spending the money.
But I am satisfied with what I have now and dont want to change any of it, every part made a very appreciable difference to me.

I'm not selling anything other than my experience.
Some things may be myth, but not what I have done.

Perhaps this isnt the topic for you.
Dont spoil it for those that can appreciate it.
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Almost as epic as that guy on anandtech who used to troll the audiophiles. Love his posts. If you are serious, I am truely sorry.
 
Had Realtek from Motherboard few years ago. Then changed to Xonar STX. Pretty big difference, and I'm no audiophile/expert.

Swans M10 Speakers on both setups.
 
adriantrances said:
Had Realtek from Motherboard few years ago. Then changed to Xonar STX. Pretty big difference, and I'm no audiophile/expert.

Swans M10 Speakers on both setups.
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Add a little loudness effect, sounds better to the untrained ear but is definately not accurate or better in reality. Cheapest trick in the book. It has had names such as 'crystallizer' etc. which do 'magic' :)
 
I miss turtle beach, they had some good cards back in the day for a reasonable price when creative was having issues.

I ran rightmark on my santa cruz against my latest Z87 board with ALC889 and they are identical in all aspects at different rates.

I'd say not bad for a PCI sound card that is over 10 years old.

Gigabyte really screwed the pooch by not going with 1150 which is superior [but not by leaps and bounds]

Most of the Z87 boards went with the latest codec.

I can't see spending another $100 on top of a $200 board price, I'd rather dump that into better speakers/headset.

Sadly the SB suite that comes with the UD4 and UD5 does not seem to make much difference at all.

I've fooled around with the settings but really can't hear any difference.
 
Turtle Beach did have some decent stuff and I even had a Philips Sound Card that was really nice back in the day when Creative/VIA was full of problems. My Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z sounds like ass...I went to an STX and the difference was night and day. Also have a SB-Z that is nice. I will say one thing...I had an Intel BadAxe 2 with an onboard realtek chip and it was quite nice. Haven't heard another board that I've had that sounded that nice.
 
I can understand the draw of wanting great audio from something like an optical link to a good receiver, but what if you don't want another big box of electronics sitting among all the other boxes? I have enough crap taking up space without even getting into however much electricity something like that uses while also generating more heat.

Between the on-board garbage I've plugged into directly and just about any discrete card, I'll take the card. I use headphones almost exclusively (nothing crazy, HD515s, HD555s, some misc earbuds) and I can tell you that plugging into the jack on my laptop sucks for no other reason than because of the background hiss. Even the old Audigy 2 ZS I stuck into my workstation at work is much better than on-board audio.

Audiophiles spending hojillions on cables doesn't make sense to me, but wanting my headphones to simply not sound like static junk basically means a discrete card is well worth it.
 
The gigabyte Z87's claim to have a built in amp that can push 600 ohms, anybody test this theory?
I have a pair of decent Sennheisers but not top shelf to test.
 
Any headphone amplifier (even if it's just a line-level out) should be able to drive a 600 ohm load, but the question becomes at what volume levels and at what expense to frequency response.
 
I know onboard has come along way, but back in the day I had an Audigy 2 ZS that litterally blew onboard solutions like VIA out of the water when it came to driving Logitech Z5500s.
 
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