Was given a new hand-me-down; here’s how it stacks up to what I’ve got.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Verdict<\/strong>: I should really send this thing off to the recycle depot.\u00a0 The chipset is ancient–any semi-modern computer will likely have better audio than this.<\/p>\n With some driver trickery, you can coax 192KHz\/24bit out of the Wolfson DAC (rear black connector). \u00a0 Drivers beyond XP are a tricky install, but according to this post<\/a>, there are suitable Japanese drivers<\/a> all the way up to Windows 8.\u00a0 To enable bit-perfect 44.1kHz playback follow a guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n Verdict<\/strong>: Ultimately too much of a pain to bother with nowadays.<\/p>\n Verdict<\/strong>: The winner and the card I’m currently using.\u00a0 It’s PCI-E, small, has both official and 3rd party driver support, has a very low Total Harmonic Distorion (THD), and a sufficiently high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).\u00a0 It’s sampling frequency isn’t as high as the X-Fi, but that probably doesn’t matter.\u00a0 For under $50<\/a> it’s tough to beat.\u00a0 Truth be told I’m using it with a pair of $30 Turtle Beach headphones so does any of this matter?<\/p>\n Verdict<\/strong>: Not to be confused with the XtremeAudio<\/em> card, which isn’t as advanced and doesn’t have the EMU20K1.\u00a0 Might be interesting to hook up for headphone use and compare to the Xonar (using my Grados).\u00a0 I’d say this has become my backup card.<\/p>\n 16bit\/44.1kHz audio is good enough <\/em>and higher sampling frequencies are likely unnecessary;\u00a0 I say this as a recovering audiophile.\u00a0 Though there’s potentially some wiggle room available regarding harmonics, I think science has demonstrated quite competently that 16bit\/44.1kHz can capture and reproduce audio such that our ears can’t distinguish the difference.<\/p>\n xiph.org article<\/a> But then why is the 16bit 48kHz SB Live! not an acceptable solution you might ask.\u00a0 This has to do with a number of factors, including the Digital Audio Converter (DAC) employed.\u00a0 The SB Live! is ancient, and DACs today are far better at what they do.\u00a0 The signal to noise ratio is low and the distortion is high.<\/p>\n Out of the audio cards I own the Xonar is the one to use and the X-Fi is my backup; I might was well give away the Chaintech and recycle the SB Live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was given a new hand-me-down; here’s how it stacks up to what I’ve got.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[28,33,31,29,32,30,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiki.lillerant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Chaintech AV-710<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n
Asus Xonar DGX<\/a><\/h4>\n
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Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic<\/a> (SB0460)<\/h4>\n
\n
Conclusion<\/h4>\n
\nxiph.org video<\/a>
\nAudio Engineering Society<\/a><\/p>\n