Winter Audio Reference: On-Board, Consumer, and Pro Solutions
by Derek Wilson on February 3, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
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Final Words
Intel HD audio quality isn't the highest in the industry for on-board design. This is fine for an average user, but if Intel is pushing on-board audio experience, they should make some enhancements to signal quality. Listening at higher volumes to quiet tracks could sometimes give the hint of a little noise that wasn't supposed to be there. Overall, the listening experience was very good for Intel's solution. And their audio enhancement software by Sonic Focus actually does a good job of delivering on its promises where all other software of a similar sort (that this reviewer has heard) falls short.
The SoundBlaster Audigy 2 isn't the best for straight audio listening. The card has IMD problems at the very often used 16-bit/44.1kHz setting (CD's, MP3's, games), which seems to produce a slight coloration of the audio. This doesn't matter as much (at all?) for movies and games, but for listening to CDs and music files, we would expect better. As a consumer card, where the target is for an entertainment systemm the Audigy 2 offers a good setup, especially when movies and gaming will be a central focus of the machine. For those who wish to dabble in recording, the Audigy 2 is certainly better than an on-board solution and offers 24-bit/96kHz recording of either analog or digital sources.
The Gina3g hits the numbers really well in some cases, but falls short in places where we'd rather see them do better. Our test would have looked better if we had an external balanced device to test against, as our loopback test created a ground loop. Listening to the Gina3g was a very clean experience, although setting up surround is interesting with the configurable ¼ inch outputs, and buying proper converters was interesting. The Gina3g is made more to be a cog in a machine than something to be listened to, but it does very well in a pinch. Of course, if the plan is to listen on the same machine as well as be used in recording, a separate audio card may be desired. The Gina3g can only maintain one sampling rate at a time and will alter all sampling rates to the most recently requested. In other words, if we're recording at 96kHz, and half way through, I double click a 44.1kHz audio track that plays on my Gina3g, half of my recording is going to sound really high pitced and fast when I play it back. This is avoidable if a separate audio card is used for playback while the Gina3g is recording (though, we would still recommend against doing this).
Interestingly, the Audigy 4 is a top performer in our tests, as the improved build quality serve to mask some of the issues that we've seen with the Audigy 2. We would still like to see balanced I/O, and truly reprogrammable sampling rates (to avoid the 44.1kHz resampling issue and IMD problems altogether). But overall, the Audigy 4 Pro is a welcome improvement to the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro. Not so much that we would recommend upgrading, but if you have to choose between them, we would point in the direction of the Audigy 4.
But that is by no means a conclusion to audio here at AnandTech. The preceding was meant to cut a cross section through PC audio. We've touched on integrated solutions, consumer add-in products, and professional cards. In future audio reviews, we will be using the cards from this review as a reference point for other products in their respective categories. As audio makes a return to the pages of AnandTech, we hope to bring out reviews of products based from the likes of M-Audio, Terratec, EMU, RME, DigiDesign, MOTU, Lynx, C-Media, NVIDIA, Analog Devices, more Realtek, and anything else you can suggest to us. We will also try to include older cards (such as the SB Live! and Turtle Beach cards) for reference in future articles as well.
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KingofL337 - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
All, I want is a review of a sound card that does realtime SPDIF DTS/DD encoding not just a card that only does it in DVD's. You find one and I'm gonna go buy it.leliel - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
i'm still using philips seismic edges (philips tbird avenger chipset, PSC705 model) in my boxen because creative can't put out a decent product. i wouldn't mind seeing the new ultimate edge (PSC724) or aurilium (PSC8xx) reviewed. happy with what i have except the latest drivers for these things are about three years old and games like WoW and republic commando aren't happy with them =PEddNog - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
MrMarbles; check out the card I have, Echo Audio Mia MIDI. Its sample rate is completely controllable, including full lock to 44.1, with zero resample as long as you bypass Kmixer by either using any of the time critical transports (for example, kernel streaming) or even a special proprietary Kmixer bypass for regular wave audio output that's included in the drivers called Purewave. When I bought it, you could find the card for just $200, and it was over a year ago.-Ed
MrMarbles - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
I'm interested in buying a soundcard for playing back highquality (if you can call MP3's that) MP3 files. I got an Audigy2 now. Very happy with the low distortion, has a very clean sound on my B&W Nautilus 805 speakers. But, they also have a very wellknown problem with 44.1khz 16bit stereo playback. So looking to upgrade. I'm a bit of a audiophile, but I can't spend too much. Gaming is not something do a lot of anymore.Pandamonium - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
Missing chipsets:Envy 24HT
nVidia Sounstorm
Maleficus - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
THANK YOU, seeing audio on the front page again is AWESOME.LocutusX - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
Oh, and the ALC850 is pretty horrible. I used a TB Santa Cruz from 2001 to 2004 (3 years) and noticed the difference straight away when I switched to the on-board sound on my new Athlon64 rig.Later, when I bought an Audigy 2 ZS for Xmas, I noticed the difference on that the moment I popped the card in. Nah, don't waste your time on an ALC850 when there are more worthy things to review;
- VIA Envy24HT cards
- the various Audiophile-ish stuff already mentioned
LocutusX - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
From what I've read @ Hydrogenaudio, it's impossible to "bypass" the resample stage with an Audigy 2 ZS (when dealing with 44.1KHz source).Someone posted a wave file which contained a particular sine wave. When played back on hardware which could natively handle 44.1KHz, it sounds fine.
When played back on hardware which resamples 44.1KHz to 48KHz, lots of weird distortion could be heard - sirens, alien noises, etc. On the Audigy 2 ZS, even if you used ASIO or Kernel Streaming output, this behaviour was observed. Only when you did a high quality (SSRC) resample to 48KHz did it sound fine.
BTW I don't see the point in reviewing the TB Santa Cruz. While a good card for its time, that was more than 2 years ago. It's been EOL (end of life) for 2 years now, and there won't be any new drivers made for it. It won't work in future OS's (XP64) and even the most recent XP32 drivers had issues with various games.
vmajor - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
Question for Derek, why was Audigy 4 judged better than the Audigy 2? It costs more and was just as bad (or worse)as the Audigy 2 in the objective tests.Regarding the audiophile incursion into Anandtech - just please beware that Audiophilia nervosa is contageous...
...when you start hearing differences between $40 and $4000 cables, power cords, volume knobs (yes, knobs, not pots), 'demagnetised' CDs, etc... take a long holiday.
DerekWilson - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
#58, PrinceGaz,Thanks for the feedback. We will explore some of these options.
We did, however, use RightMark 3DSound for our CPU Utilization tests. :-) There wasn't much more detail we could have gone into. We could have reported standard deviation for CPU usage, or even shown the graph over time for each card (which looked roughly the same in every case). The only test we really didn't include there was a test of the maximum number of audio channels on each card, though 32 happened to also be the max channels for the Realtek solution (64 channels for soundblaster 128 channels for gina3g).
There's not much more information that RightMark 3DSound provides than what we showed. Unelss there's something specific you would like us to explore with the program? The effect of custom audio files?