Winter Audio Reference: On-Board, Consumer, and Pro Solutions
by Derek Wilson on February 3, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
The Anatomy of a Sound Review (User Experience)
The factors included in an end user experience are much more straight-forward than the technical electrical performance of audio hardware. Of course, they are highly interconnected. The listening experience and quality of audio recorded by hardware is a direct result of the electrical capabilities of the hardware as discussed in the previous section. Talking about listening on a qualitative level is very difficult, especially when trying to give others good advice about what to buy. We can sit here and say that: if a device with one set of numbers (dynamic range, THD, etc.) is played on $50000 speakers, it will sound different than a card with worse numbers. What we can't say is how great this difference will be (because the speakers will still likely introduce more distortion).
Random PC speakers are not going to show many differences unless a sound card is essentially broken.
Again, it's difficult to listen to hardware and know what you're hearing. Our approach was to listen to a track over and over and over on one device and then immediately switch to another in order to listen for differences. If there are any, we try to determine what they sounded like, and why they are there.
For high quality audio testing, we used Sony MDR-7509 studio monitors (open air headsets were evaluated, but since we're testing near computers, and henceforth noise, isolation was desirable). For surround and gaming testing, we used Logitech Z-5300 speakers.
This brings us past audio quality and into something that AnandTech readers will be familiar with: performance. We tested how many direct sound channels that we can run (and at what CPU overhead). We will also look at how much of a performance hit it is to enable audio in Unreal Tournament 2004. We had run numbers for Doom 3 as well, but the fact is that there just isn't a performance difference - these newer games are simply too bound in other areas to exhibit any performance difference on different audio cards.
We also need to look at audio API support. As Creative is the mover and shaker in the industry, they bully most companies into using their EAX for audio in some way or another. For example, they forced Id to incorporate EAX into Doom 3 by leveraging John's "Carmack's Reverse" shadowing algorithm against him - Creative holds the patent on depth fail stencil shadows through 3DLabs. Then there's Sensaura, which Creative now also owns. The latest versions of Sensaura include support for EAX 2.0. In our look at Unreal Tournament 2004, we will see performance under software 3D, hardware 3D using OpenAL, and hardware 3D + EAX.
We like the idea that Id has in playing audio straight to surround channels through DirectX. You get better results than using DS3D (or any other 2 channel) positional audio and it's more accurate than upmixing using features like Creative's CMSS 3D. When actually creating true surround sound, the developer has full control, and since Id did it with no performance hit, there's obviously more than enough CPU power to go around these days for doling out audio. Of course, in implementing audio this way, the game developer must give up the comfort of the built APIs and the HRTF (head related transfer functions) that they implement, and build a sound engine to keep track of everything themselves. The major problem of implementing real positional sound then becomes lack of convenience rather than lack of hardware power.
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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?