So I'm attempting to build a PC and looking at sound cards and I can't find much good information about what I would need in a sound card for my current setup. I am connecting my PC to a surround receiver which at least for the time being has 5.0 speakers connected but I would hopefully future proom myself for 7.1 sound. I plan to connect to my reciever via the HDMI output on my graphics card, (I plan to buy GTX 670). For DVDs and Blu-rays my understanding is that I can bitstream to my reciever which means I wouldn't need a souncard to process anything here. What I would want is for various digital music files and games to sound good. In my searching I am finding recommendations for cards such as ASUS Xonar Essence STX, but the details seem to suggest they are geared toward headphone use and I'm having trouble finding out what is best for actual surround sound.
Choosing a sound card
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I was just about to mention the Xonar Essence STX. That's what I use. Admittedly, I primarily use it for headphone use, but it should be fine with speakers. Most of the technical info, you've probably already read. As far as HDMI, your GPU should come with a small cable to connect the GPU and soundcard. Or the STX might come with it; mine didn't. If not, they're easily aquirable through ebay. Alternatively, you can use an spdif connection- either the optical or coxial- if you want surround via an external reciever. There's no analog L/R/LB/RB/C. etc. connections.
The STX really is top of the line for it's price IMO. I not only use it for listening to audio, but also creating it. The ASIO drivers are pretty good and you can work with very low latency.. if you ever find yourself doing audio production.
For surround you need something with Dolby Digital Live and/or DTS connect.
You could look at the Xonar DX.
Thanks for the replies. I'm not sure what I'm looking for when I'm looking at cards though. Can anyone help me figure out what features I actually need? Does a sound card effect audio when it's output digitally? And what features such as EAX am I looking for for gaming? (I know EAX isn't popular anymore it's just an example). Someone else told me I don't need a sound card at all for digital out but I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about or not.
Since digital sound is 1s and 0s, you'll get no difference in quality between soundcards and onboard. HOWEVER, for what you want, you need a sound card since to mix games down an optical cable in 5.1 you need dolby digital live or dts connect features which are very unlikely to be on motherboard sound. If that's all you care about, get the cheapest card with those features (probably the Asus Xonar DX but you will want to check).Thanks for the replies. I'm not sure what I'm looking for when I'm looking at cards though. Can anyone help me figure out what features I actually need? Does a sound card effect audio when it's output digitally? And what features such as EAX am I looking for for gaming? (I know EAX isn't popular anymore it's just an example). Someone else told me I don't need a sound card at all for digital out but I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about or not.
baryjayne
[QUOTE="baryjayne"]Thanks for the replies. I'm not sure what I'm looking for when I'm looking at cards though. Can anyone help me figure out what features I actually need? Does a sound card effect audio when it's output digitally? And what features such as EAX am I looking for for gaming? (I know EAX isn't popular anymore it's just an example). Someone else told me I don't need a sound card at all for digital out but I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about or not.kraken2109Since digital sound is 1s and 0s, you'll get no difference in quality between soundcards and onboard. HOWEVER, for what you want, you need a sound card since to mix games down an optical cable in 5.1 you need dolby digital live or dts connect features which are very unlikely to be on motherboard sound. If that's all you care about, get the cheapest card with those features (probably the Asus Xonar DX but you will want to check). Pretty much on the money. The DAC at the other end is what determines the analog output quality. The only time you get changes in digital audio before it hits the DAC is if you specifically enable any DSP features to color the sound, like adjusting the EQ, and that's because it's already mixed in digitally before being output in any form. EAX reverb/chorus/occlusion effects also go through, if available. I don't know where the misconception started that they couldn't go through S/PDIF, but that's not the case. (I know you said nothing of the sort, but chances are someone will get it mixed up when reading through this.)
I'm using HDMI out not optical. Does that change anything? Also I thought I was understanding that a sound card processes things such as sound placement in games so you would have a different digital signal with a card than without.baryjayneIt means you don't need to bother with Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect to get a surround sound signal to your receiver, at least. HDMI has enough bandwidth for 8 uncompressed PCM channels, while S/PDIF only has enough for 2. Sound cards did have a role in processing sound placement and environmental effects, back when DirectSound3D and OpenAL were still in prevalent use. However, with the move to XAudio2 + X3DAudio, FMOD Ex, and other such APIs and middlewares, everything's processed on the CPU now...unfortunately not as good as it used to be with the old APIs, but that's the way it is. (The fundamental difference is that we've gone from APIs that basically tell the sound device the 3D positional coordinates of each sound and let it sort out where and how to play those sounds to systems that pre-mix everything before it hits the sound device. No loss for 5.1/7.1 speaker users, very big loss for headphone users expecting true 3D binaural audio like they had in the past, with the right sound card setup.)
Sound cards did have a role in processing sound placement and environmental effects, back when DirectSound3D and OpenAL were still in prevalent use. However, with the move to XAudio2 + X3DAudio, FMOD Ex, and other such APIs and middlewares, everything's processed on the CPU now...unfortunately not as good as it used to be with the old APIs, but that's the way it is.NamelessPlayerOk, so if I have a pretty large selection of older games on my Steam account that I haven't played yet, would I want any hardware for that, either a sound card or a motherboard with support for these older formats? Thanks for all your help by the way.
Games output in PCM which has nothing to do with any codecs, it's just raw audio. If you can transfer PCM then you don't need compression codecs like dolby.kraken2109That I understand, but you can have a mono or stereo PCM signal, so my question was more at what stage of the process is the original audio being encoded with its surround sound information. Are games encoding Dolby Digital before sending on the signal as PCM? I imagine it would have to be this way or the receiver would have nothing to decode. I should probably know this, but it's surprisingly difficult to find this information laid out explicitly. Happy gaming, Boz
[QUOTE="kraken2109"]Games output in PCM which has nothing to do with any codecs, it's just raw audio. If you can transfer PCM then you don't need compression codecs like dolby.BozanimalThat I understand, but you can have a mono or stereo PCM signal, so my question was more at what stage of the process is the original audio being encoded with its surround sound information. Are games encoding Dolby Digital before sending on the signal as PCM? I imagine it would have to be this way or the receiver would have nothing to decode. I should probably know this, but it's surprisingly difficult to find this information laid out explicitly. Happy gaming, Boz I don't know for sure but i'd assume it's just 8 channels of unencoded audio, the receiver doesn't have to decode.
The sound processing in games works like this:
- Sound exists as resource files on disc (source files may be compressed, uncompressed, and of various differing qualities - voice vs music vs soudn effects).
- Whenever the engine desides that a sound must play it reads the source file.
- The engine uses it's own built in audio processing to render the source file. It plays it AND it processes it by applying effects, and mixing it into one or more channels based on the audio settings, the capabilities of the audio engine, and the locaiton of the sound in respect to the listening object/character/camera.
- Once the audio is part of the "sound stage" of the game it renders it to the operating system/console back end. The exact format of the audio at this stage I believe, in msot instances is just plain old PCM. But some engine might render encoded audio of a different sort. After that the hardware/software responsible for actually outputting the audio does this, sometimes encoding it first such as through a dolby codec, or rendering the digital input as an analog signal.
[QUOTE="Bozanimal"]That's just it: It has to be encoded somewhere. For movies the surround sound information is mixed and encoded in the studio before being written to disc and distributed to the public. I was under the impression that the receiver always has to decode, even if it's an uncompressed PCM signal. So my question was, if there is no sound card or on-board audio solution to process and encode that information, it must be done at the CPU level and passed on via PCM to the receiver via HDMI. Otherwise a sound card would be required to encode two-channel audio into a compatible format via Dolby Live or DTS Connect.NamelessPlayerMovies handle audio very, very differently from video games. They can get away with pre-encoding their positional audio. Games can't, for obvious reasons. That's why it tends to stay as PCM; that, and PC sound cards were designed to implement surround via extra 3.5mm analog outputs, not through a compressed single S/PDIF output. In other words, limited bandwidth in the output interface was never an issue to begin with, because PC surround speaker systems had analog interfaces with multiple 3.5mm cables. Also note that the key difference here is HDMI, not S/PDIF. As I said earlier, HDMI can handle 8 channels of uncompressed PCM just fine, whereas S/PDIF needed lossy compression codecs like Dolby Digital/AC-3 and DTS to fit just 6 channels. Receivers have no problem handling more than two channels of PCM if the interface used can get all of those channels to the receiver. HDMI can, S/PDIF can't. Since PC games work with PCM sound data already and HDMI has the bandwidth, no encoding is needed. Does that make sense?
The sound processing in games works like this: - Sound exists as resource files on disc (source files may be compressed, uncompressed, and of various differing qualities - voice vs music vs sound effects). -Whenever the engine decides that a sound must play it reads the source file. - The engine uses it's own built in audio processing to render the source file. It plays it AND it processes it by applying effects, and mixing it into one or more channels based on the audio settings, the capabilities of the audio engine, and the location of the sound in respect to the listening object/character/camera. - Once the audio is part of the "sound stage" of the game it renders it to the operating system/console back end. The exact format of the audio at this stage I believe, in most instances is just plain old PCM. But some engine might render encoded audio of a different sort. After that the hardware/software responsible for actually outputting the audio does this, sometimes encoding it first such as through a Dolby codec, or rendering the digital input as an analog signal.KinthalisYou explained everything very well. That's pretty much how it works with game audio, especially modern games with software audio engines. Older PC games (usually 2006 releases and prior) generally differ in that the game engine passes off the 3D positional audio data straight to the sound card driver for mixing and effect processing, instead of doing so internally and then sending it to the sound card driver. Thus, getting the intended sound depends a lot on having the right sound card with the right DSP features and not just having a good DAC, because the software fallbacks will often drop sound effects outright and be significantly more limited in mixing capabilities.
I didn't know the processing was handed off to soundcards back in the day. Makes sense, since so many games required a sound card for better sound.
I didn't know the processing was handed off to soundcards back in the day. Makes sense, since so many games required a sound card for better sound.KinthalisI actually miss the old DirectSound3D/OpenAL approach in that it just passes off the 3D positional audio data to the sound device for mixing and output. Usually, it's a sound card DSP, but it could also be software like Rapture3D (which only works for OpenAL games, sadly). What this means is that getting proper 3D binaural audio for headphones is possible, with the right hardware or software. Recent games don't allow for that because they do the mixing in-engine, and usually virtual 7.1 is the most I can get for a binaural HRTF mix, which means no sense of height and so forth. I can understand why they focused more on hardware-accelerated audio back then, though. Enabling A3D in Half-Life resulted in a noticeable FPS hit on the CPUs of the day...imagine how much worse it would be if it was entirely software-driven on that same 1999-era hardware. These days, we can get away with processing reverb/chorus/occlusion/etc. effects in software without much overhead on modern CPUs, but they could at least throw us headphone users a bone and not stick us with one-dimensional stereo panning like they currently do.
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