[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?
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Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?
During the '90s and the early '00s, dedicated soundcards were in-
demand components in much the same way GPUs are today. From what I
know, Creative won, on-board sound became good enough sometime
between Windows XP and Windows 7, and the audio enthusiasts moved
on to external DACs and $2000 headphones. Today Creative still
sells soundcards, but none of them appear to be substantial
improvements over previous models. So what other reasons could
have caused the decline in interest? Was there nothing that could
be improved upon? Were there improvements on the software side that
made hardware redundant and/or useless? Is there any other company
besides Creative, however large or small, still holding the torch
for innovating in this space?
Author : Dracophoenix
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-09-01 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mmphosis wrote:
| I can only dream of a day when dedicated video cards become just
| as redundant.
| mepian wrote:
| At this point there are no dedicated video cards, there are
| throughput-oriented multicore floating point coprocessors that
| sometimes include video interfaces.
| TillE wrote:
| Right, it's difficult to imagine external GPUs becoming
| obsolete without a radical new computing technology to take
| their place.
|
| For games it's easy to find useful ways to use 10x the
| existing GPU power, not even counting an increase in display
| resolution.
|
| For massively parallel computing, the sky is the limit.
| wolrah wrote:
| > I can only dream of a day when dedicated video cards become
| just as redundant.
|
| They have been for years as long as you don't need high end 3D
| or compute capabilities. Intel's iGPUs are plenty for most
| normal desktop use cases and AMD's are good enough to run most
| mainstream games as long as you're willing to turn the detail
| down a bit. Not to mention what Apple and the ARM world in
| general have done.
|
| Someone who's not looking to play the latest games with the
| settings cranked can easily go without.
|
| The top end will always want as much horsepower as they can
| get, so the dedicated video card is never going away unless we
| figure out some new sort of computational load that takes over
| the accelerator market in the same sort of way that GPGPU
| killed standalone audio and physics acceleration.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| They are for typical use cases, been using intel gfx for ten
| years or so. Games? No.
| exabrial wrote:
| They're alive and well:
| https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0BK1
|
| This is the unit I have and I'm quite happy with it. It's on the
| "low end" of "good". It has a surprisingly low noise floor. Lacks
| sophisticated routing and switching. Latency is really well at
| 192khz, good enough for live mixing, as low as you have the CPU
| mmmph to handle it.
|
| They only take off in price from here, up to thousands of $.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Pure digital audio and huge hard drives killed them. Back when we
| were chasing better and better synthesis - FM, wavetable...
| because playing back CD quality digital audio wasn't possible -
| you were lucky to have 23kHz mono, or nothing at all, your hard
| drive was tiny and MP3 wasn't a thing yet... Every sound card
| upgrade was literally music to your ears.
|
| Now every computer has a little chip that plays back at least CD
| quality audio from an infinite pool of storage and RAM. Nobody
| wants to hear MIDI in their games anymore. I'm not even sure what
| a better sound card could even do for me - reduce line noise,
| drive high impedance headphones or something. Boring!
| gxqoz wrote:
| My friend had a great sound card while I didn't. I remember
| being jealous of how good midis from vgmusic.com sounded on his
| machine compared to mine. Night and day.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I used to call the Sierra 800 number and press a key to speak
| to a representative, just because the hold music consisted of
| selections of their in-game music played on the Roland MT-32.
| It sounded amazing compared to my Sound Blaster.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I had a girlfriend who was a musician and back in the late 90s,
| home recording was rare (but starting to become a thing). We
| found that the cheapest sound card from a music store had lower
| noise and better signal-to-noise ratio than even the best (or
| most expensive) sound card available at computer stores.
|
| For games today, I use the audio interface that came with the
| computer. For dealing with my synthesizers, I use a Scarlett by
| Focusrite [0].
|
| [0] - https://focusrite.com/en/scarlett
| Sharlin wrote:
| I guess for a few years there might have been a market for
| hardware MP3 decoders. I faintly remember back when playing
| MP3s did take a sizeable chunk of CPU time. But after a Moore
| cycle or two the cost was negligible, and today Spotify
| probably spends much more CPU on drawing its interface than
| decoding the audio stream...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| And anything I can think of that I'd want a sound card to do
| these days is being handled by GPUs - like that NVidia AI
| noise cancellation, where your kids can scream 5 feet away
| and no one can hear them on Zoom.
| toast0 wrote:
| Not really on PCs, IMHO. With well optimized software, you
| could decode in realtime on an i486@100Mhz, a pentium 75
| could use winamp and mIRC simultaneously, IIRC. If you didn't
| have enough CPU to decode mp3, it probably made more sense to
| upgrade that rather than a mp3 decoder card (if they
| existed). Mpeg-1/2 (video) decoder cards were more necessary.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Thanks for the flashback. I too remember when playing an MP3
| took a good chunk of processor utilization, maybe 40%, and
| doing too many other things at the same time would cause it
| to stutter. I also remember when 1080p and 4k were taxing
| respectively.
| therealplato wrote:
| The only computer i've ever had with what I consider an
| acceptable level of line noise was a macbook pro
|
| even a $15 USB-to-dual-3.5mm adapter sounded significantly
| better on other machines
|
| I experienced this annoying line noise on ASUS, MSI and Dell
| motherboards
| samatman wrote:
| Audio production, I would claim, is the only niche the
| Macintosh has continually dominated since the first Steve
| Jobs era.
|
| Even desktop publishing took a turn towards Windows in the
| mid-late 90s, whether it stayed 'dominant' is a fuzzy
| question but it was clearly losing market share.
|
| But you won't find a professional music studio without a Mac,
| this has been true since the late 80s. This is not to say it
| can't be done with other equipment, just that as a matter of
| practice it isn't.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > and the audio enthusiasts moved on to external DACs
|
| Well, the internal ones still exist [0]. However, with higher bus
| speeds, external interfaces are more practical: you can connect
| more devices to them, and you can move them - a lot of music
| today is done on laptops.
|
| [0] E.g.: https://www.esi-audio.com/products/maya44ex/
| h2odragon wrote:
| The onboard sound chips became good enough, and for those for
| whom they weren't good enough the noise reduction bonus of an
| external DAC was worth it anyway. Computers are generally bad for
| analog signals within a few inches of the case.
|
| I think another factor is MP3 players and phone audio; people
| stopped using their computer as the (interface to) media source
| when other things took that function over for them.
| hedgehog wrote:
| There was a point of "good enough" and then not long after that
| (2005ish?) essentially all motherboards started including
| onboard audio. I would imagine the market for separate audio
| cards shrunk below sustainable at that point. Most everything
| else in the case (GPUs, RAM) are headed there too, it's just a
| matter of incremental development on the existing trajectory.
| simplyaccont wrote:
| There are a lot of mentions how onboard audio killed sound cards
| and that there are usb audio adapters.
|
| This is right till you want something a little bit out of the
| ordinary: usb dac with 5.1 that supports hardware decoding of
| DSD/etc . Most of the options have either $x000 price tag. The
| next best thing is to use A/V Receiver via HDMI
| oneplane wrote:
| They aren't relevant anymore for the same reason that USB cards,
| serial cards, network cards and SATA cards aren't relevant
| anymore. They still have their nice, and in commercial settings
| you'll still see HBAs (with SATA but mainly SAS), 10G+ network
| cards, and audio interfaces, but but most of the personal
| computers the level of 'better than good enough' was already
| reached.
|
| There is no point to using an add-in card if the facility is now
| on the main board and can do the task to the user's wishes.
|
| The same thing can be said about many previously modular
| components where more and more is now simply a function of the
| main board itself. Take all the legacy I/O which used to be
| various chips, often on various add-in boards. They were all
| condensed into one single Super IO chip that can do all of it,
| but at a fraction of the size, cost and energy usage.
|
| A lot of peripherals used to be implemented in separate chips and
| sometimes even discrete logic. If we were to try to do that today
| we'd either have to cut 90% of the currently available standard
| features or make the mainboard ten times as big to be able to
| implement it the old school way.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Cost saving? CPUs and new algorithms can do sound with low single
| digit cpu usage and doesn't justify a cpu offload card.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Onboard DACs are good enough for HiFi, so there's less need for
| specialized sound cards today, except for making music when one
| needs ultra low latency (built in audio is getting a lot better
| also at this however) or multi track recording. I'll be buying
| shortly a Tascam US-16x08; it doesn't offer much more in terms of
| sound fidelity than my older Steinberg CI1, but it can record 16
| channels at the same time, which is handy when miking a complete
| set of instruments (drumset mikes + overheads, keyboards, guitars
| & bass amps, voice, etc... you never have enough inputs) so I can
| easily keep track during rehearsals and have more freedom during
| recordings.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| I contend that built-in is not very good for HiFi; my Behringer
| audio interface is visibly better in audio quality on my
| headphones because its DAC is better.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| Have you seen the DACs they're integrating into the higher
| end motherboards these days? They're using the same ESS DACs
| you'll find on high end audiophile grade equipment.
| pjlegato wrote:
| Soundcard-like devices called "audio interfaces"[1] -- now
| usually USB breakout boxes -- are alive and well in the
| professional audio segment, targeted at musicians, recording
| studios, video editing shops, and similar applications.
|
| They're not necessary for consumer apps. Consumer audio
| applications got "good enough" with mass produced builtin
| motherboard "soundcard on a chips" that basically replicated the
| function of the old soundcards at a much lower price point.
|
| If you want to, say, connect 16 microphones at once and record to
| 16 seperate tracks, or you plan to apply a bunch of digital
| effects and therefore want a much higher sample rate than what
| your consumer audio chip can do, you can buy an audio interface.
|
| [1] https://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio-recording/audio-
| inter...
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Another use is rendering virtual instruments with low latency,
| so you can play with a keyboard and render sounds live. Built
| in sound chips usually have unacceptable levels of latency,
| even with custom drivers.
| rektide wrote:
| It's been a while since I broke out & tuned JACK latency, but
| i think 2 samples of 3ms worked fine on most devices I'd
| tried, even without basics like a preemptible kernel, on
| boring old ancient intel chipsets. I'd expect most apps have
| no trouble getting under 16ms on basically any x86 hardware.
|
| I'd be shocked to find that the majority of these aftermarket
| devices do at all better. Many are usb, which, even if you do
| have a fancy isosynchronous device, I'd still expect to be
| significantly slower than in chipset or pcie.
|
| I could be totally off! But I dont think there's really
| specific chipset capabilities that make a bug difference here
| (other than iso, which only helps to counter the downgrade of
| using usb). Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a
| hardware capability thing? I think it's just drivers, that
| modern tech like pipewire has many of the benefits for free
| about more closely mapping hardware resources to where apps
| can use it. I thought ASIO is mostly a product segmentation
| thing. It'd be neat to take a software virtual adapter like
| ASIO4ALL & see what kind of buffering really is required
| there, see what latency that brings consumer gear down to.
|
| I do also remember Android fighting to get their latency down
| to reasonable levels, which counter to my point suggests
| latency in general is somewhat hard. There are much fewer
| system resources there, not missing a tick is harder to
| insure, but iirc the bigger issue was just that modems & the
| regular audio subsystems just had really funky audio driver
| paths that's been slapped together for a really long time, &
| some modernjzatuon was drsperately needed. This was like...
| 7+ years ago maybe?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware
| capability thing
|
| Yeah there's replacement ASIO drivers for the onboard sound
| such as ASIO4ALL or FLEXASIO. But I can agree with
| TremendousJudge that I've never gotten reasonable low
| latency with them, no matter my buffer size.
|
| CoreAudio on mac works just fine however.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I can only speak for my own experience, but the cheapest
| Focusrite outperformed my builtin soundcard with ASIO4ALL
| drivers both in latency and quality. On the builtin,
| getting the latency lower than 12ms resulted in noticeable
| glitches.
| fossuser wrote:
| Also required for fancy remote work from home microphone
| setups.
|
| If you want the Shure SM7B you need an audio interface (and
| probably also a cloud lift or dynamite to bump up the gain).
|
| Lots of streamers, podcasters, youtube people use them.
| endorphine wrote:
| Another use case is decent vinyl rips.
| ssharp wrote:
| I used to love MIDI's and was always excited to run my whole
| collection through any new sound card. Of course, the best option
| was to run MIDI out to my Yamaha keyboard and play everything
| through that.
|
| It's still fun today, 25-30 years later, to crack open in a 90's
| MIDI in a DAW and route the channel outs through virtual
| instruments to see how they sound.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| USB
|
| If you're serious about audio you just plug a cable into your
| breakout box and have your interfaces. converts, and preamps
| there. Your sound hardware can be anything from a pure i/o to an
| elaborate instrument under computer control. You can do audio
| synthesis and compositing on the CPU, GPU (not so different from
| a DSP) or external hardware.
|
| Soundcards are only 'gone' in the sense that PCI cards are less
| important because many people use laptops and the audio built
| into motherboards is more than Good Enough for everyday purposes.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| With the rise of wireless headphones, the "sound card" is
| actually within the headphones now, so the sound card in your
| machine is irrelevant.
| hulitu wrote:
| The sound quality of those headphones is most of the time
| terrible.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| True, but it's good enough for most purposes. Thus those who
| value convenience more than great sound quality use them,
| where as those looking for sound quality already use external
| DACs because built-in sound cards aren't the greatest either.
| speeder wrote:
| The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven
| (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows
| drivers rules.
|
| When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was
| launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many
| people defending them claiming it was for better stability,
| avoiding blue screens and so on.
|
| But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of
| the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio
| calculations that were then just starting to take off, people
| were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics
| API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio
| processor, and you would have games where the audio was
| calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...
|
| After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers
| still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so
| sound cards became kinda pointless.
|
| Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full
| of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
|
| Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current
| ones have way less features than the ones that they made during
| the sound card era.
|
| EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed
| analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing
| prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors,
| so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-
| square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some
| monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even
| having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and
| in a sense also affected video development, some features that
| video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware
| design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.
|
| As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was
| not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog
| signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to
| go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The best of competitive sound now is the Sennheiser GSX which
| is an external USB DAC/Amp. It has a good 7.1 to headphones
| mode that gets you about the best surround sound on headphones
| for games/movies you can get, it impacts the tone the least and
| has one of the best HRTF's I have heard in eyars. But it pales
| in comparison to the cards we had 20 years ago, I miss my
| Aureal A3D.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Ditto, I can't say how much of it is pure nostalgia, but I
| feel like Counter Strike 1.x on my old Turtle Beach Montego
| II gave better positional sound than any game/hardware does
| nowadays.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Is it better than Dolby Atmos you think?
| Pulcinella wrote:
| The PS5 has an audio chip loosely based on the design of the
| PS3's Cell CPU. It's used to compute HRTF 3D audio. It's really
| cool, but it's basically the only modern example (not sure what
| Apple is doing for it's 3D audio) and of course it's a console
| so it's not a separate, user replaceable sound card.
|
| It's a shame because I would love more audio sources to support
| HRTF (head related transfer function) and "ray traced" audio.
| vel0city wrote:
| Games can have HRTF if the developers want to include it, it
| doesn't take a fancy sound card to make it happen. Counter-
| Strike Global Offensive had an update a few years ago to
| implement HRTF, its now labeled as the "3D Audio" option in
| the game. It works on pretty much any modern sound card.
| com2kid wrote:
| > The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-
| driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to
| Windows drivers rules.
|
| Creative drivers were a double digit % of all Windows BSODs.
| Microsoft gave Creative plenty of time to fix their drivers,
| creative never did, so sound drivers got booted from the
| kernel.
| naikrovek wrote:
| ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the
| driver architecture change.
|
| drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they
| had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver
| could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to
| anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this
| gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist.
|
| drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to
| how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is
| that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer
| could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel
| could say "no." imagine being a driver maintainer and needing
| to react to this change.
|
| this change often required a _complete_ rewrite of the driver.
| this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited.
|
| this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to
| become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any
| changes to driver arch, i assure you.
|
| everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what
| caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply
| took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old
| driver model, and people wanted working drivers before
| everything was implemented in the new drivers.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything
| it wanted to anywhere it wanted
|
| This is a thing too, but the main problem was what a kernel
| level drivers not only could, but WOULD crash the kernel (ie
| cause a BSOD) if something goes wrong. And things gone wrong
| very, very often.
|
| People like to bitch about changes in NT6+, but I have seen
| waaay less BSODs (not related to the botched hardware) after
| that.
| naikrovek wrote:
| thank you, i forgot to mention that.
| majormajor wrote:
| This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of
| tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for
| long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support
| for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as
| VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a
| hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by
| definition _non-perfect_ results - decoding a digital stream,
| sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. They started
| laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn 't
| commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for
| instance, was extremely common still and allowed.
|
| And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that
| "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had
| anything to do with intercepting _pre-encoded_ multi-channel
| DVD /digital media streams. They seem completely separate from
| each other as far as technical pipelines go.
|
| Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before
| Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach
| Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until
| 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...).
|
| CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs,
| could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a
| sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get
| improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can
| benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs
| immediately.
| MAGZine wrote:
| I had a decent gaming machine in 2007-2008, and, in
| particular I remember that Battlefield 2 sounded a LOT better
| with a soundcard. The difference was night and day.
|
| In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which
| was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to
| Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions
| [deleted]
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| My recollection as well, and supported by the chart on this
| page showing a huge drop in sales from 2001-2003:
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560.
| ..
|
| (It's not a great chart but shows a general trend.)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better
| stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.
|
| If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm
| glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to
| tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards,
| video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a
| driver.
|
| > After that, the only use of sound cards became what the
| drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled
| audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.
|
| _Discrete_ sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost
| every consumer motherboard had an AC '97 compatible audio coded
| on board.
|
| So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound
| system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live!
| in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) -
| you just could use the onboard one.
|
| > having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create
| new audio on the fly.
|
| NO THANKS: https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9
|
| And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized
| music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized
| sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| >Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards
| full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
|
| Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less
| power than a sound card.
|
| Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV
| receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is
| still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2.
|
| The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:
|
| 1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire
| and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter
| how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and
| outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC
| for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound
| cards.
|
| 2. Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones,
| find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run
| a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use
| case in the gaming world for sound cards.
|
| Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there
| are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for
| surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be
| experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card
| required.
|
| https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound
|
| Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of
| the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you
| just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you
| have 5.1, and it works (mostly).
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| I have sub 5ms latency with my RME sound card, could probably
| go lower. What will hurt after a long while is the bandwidth
| at 192khz plus some other protocol on top (clock syncing,
| midi...). But we're speaking of more than 64 channel in AND
| out.
|
| So USB is pretty good, and for most sound card, USB2 is
| enough. Otherwise you can go Thunderbolt, which offer on par
| experience with PCIe.
|
| What a consumer sound card offer now a day is better dac
| compare to the one of your motherboard or better output for
| headset.
| copperx wrote:
| 64 channels I/O at 192khz over USB2? That's insane. Isn't
| USB2's bandwith 60 MB/sec?
|
| Ok, I just checked, and a 192kHz 24-bit WAV file is only
| 0.56 MB per sec. Nice.
| rkagerer wrote:
| _No matter how hard you try an external metal box with
| multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI
| /PCIe card inside a PC for recording_
|
| USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed
| hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my
| own limited experience. This comes into play when doing music
| keyboard recording.
|
| eg. I found it difficult to find a USB MIDI adapter that
| didn't introduce unacceptable latency (when trying to record
| new tracks synced in real time to existing ones). Edirol was
| recommended to me but even after tweaking settings for hours
| it fell short. I wound up buying a second-hand Creative X-Fi
| Elite Pro PCIe card and love it.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The latency for USB3 is ~30 mS.
|
| I don't think it's a USB protocol problem but rather a
| driver/manufacturer problem.
| andybak wrote:
| If I recall correctly MIDI itself had a typical latency
| several milliseconds on classic-era dedicated hardware.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-
| designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at
| least in my own limited experience.
|
| This may be true but I've never had latency issues with USB
| soundcards. Right now I have a Line6 Helix Floor unit that
| I use to play guitar with. I can route the audio through
| the Helix effects, into Logic and back to Helix for more
| post-processing and have no latency problems.
|
| I have had other brands and models and none introduced
| perceivable latency.
|
| I don't use MIDI but I doubt it requires less latency than
| live guitar playing.
|
| I had a PCIe soundcard a few years ago that made it almost
| impossible to get rid of ground hum though.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| I also have latency issues with USB soundcards and MIDI
| devices, specifically. Tried multiple vendors and in each
| one introduced ~100-200 milliseconds of delay. The old
| PCI SoundBlaster Audigy card I had 20 years ago with a
| the standard DIN MIDI interface was orders of magnitude
| better, even running Windows XP.
| andybak wrote:
| For audio is that via Directsound (if that's still a
| thing), ASIO or what?
|
| Last time I did audio, installing ASIO4ALL was essential.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I don't know. I didn't think a mere audio interface plus
| soundfonts was an adequate replacement for a really good
| soundcard like the Yamaha SW100XG:
| https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-
| yamaha-s... .
|
| Then there's Korg's Oasys PCI, which was so powerful that for
| a long time people kept using Windows 98 after Korg stopped
| making drivers: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-
| oasys-pci
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| For playing older games that relied on that hardware, sure
| soundfonts aren't a great replacement. But modern games
| moved away from needing to use a soundcard audio engine and
| are just able to completely do it on the CPU, and the only
| real benefit of the soundcard at that point is the
| latency/dac/amp
| 0xfaded wrote:
| This might be due to computers and headphones becoming
| portable. When I was a kid my PC had a soundblaster connected
| to a hacky 7.1 setup in my room, and counterstrike supported
| it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create
| new audio on the fly.
|
| To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most
| purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to
| store (and later, to _stream_ ). And for musicians, once CPUs
| became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless
| possibilities took over from HW synthesis.
| gnramires wrote:
| Something like (fragment?) shaders for audio would be amazing
| though. Or maybe just an embedded low power CPU (running
| realtime). I think there's a lot of room for generative audio
| still (or various degrees of "rendering audio"), or applying
| distortions like doppler, various reverbs, or just generating
| things on the fly via synthesis, you can do things like make
| each effect unique and have various custom parameters
| (material pairs, impact velocity, room conditions, etc.).
|
| I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because
| it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem
| (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering
| (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation
| is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much
| detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird
| (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| There's still sound card with programmable DSP, quite often
| used to replicate high end effects. They cost a lot - and
| every plug-in are specialized to a brand. Still quite
| useful because the quality of those are very high, and
| don't impact the recording process.
|
| Or there's still some "generic" box (I mean that you can
| program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara.
| They're quite niche thought, like modular synth.
| EnigmaCurry wrote:
| Generating sound on the GPU via shaders is definitely a
| thing. There's a bunch on shadertoy that do just that : htt
| ps://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter..
| .
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Sounds kinda like ray tracing and physically based
| rendering to me
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Also, disk space became cheap enough that the game could
| store audio files (such as MP3s) instead of generating the
| audio on the fly by the sound card. I remember Age of Empires
| (released 1997) music were MIDI files and the "instruments"
| would be changed by the game's code to make the music sound
| much better. EverQuest (1999) also started with MIDI files
| but later expansions replaced the music with MP3 files.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Sure, that's what I meant by "once CD quality digitized
| audio became cheap enough to store". Both the fact that
| once games started to be shipped on CD, they could
| literally play audio tracks straight from the CD, and the
| fact that faster CPUs and better codecs made it feasible to
| ship compressed audio and decode it in realtime.
| happymellon wrote:
| Surely this is like the raytracing scenario for GPUs.
|
| There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing
| something which the accelerators are better at. Audio
| acceleration I guess peaked too early or they just couldn't
| get the tech demos as impressive as graphics.
|
| I remember reading about a demo, which I believe was from
| Matrox. They managed to get an audio 3D environment working
| over a pair of stereo headphones which was good enough that
| you could play Doom headless. Just close your eyes and you
| could tell where people were.
|
| A lot of what I read about here is that prerecorded samples
| is good enough, in the same way that raster lighting is
| good enough and raytracing is a waste of time.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Diminishing returns. But IIRC the thing that killed 3D
| audio was patent wars, like what happened to force
| feedback.
| pacomerh wrote:
| The included audio interfaces got to a point where they're good
| enough for the conventional user. But that aside, Having an
| external interfaces, like we do now provides better and more
| modular options. Better latency, quality, DAC converters,
| additional inputs/outputs, etc. Focusrite, M-audio, Presonus,
| Motu, Behringer, Unversal Audio, the list goes on.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| AC97 (1997) was the first blow - this was Intel's improvement on
| the defacto SB16 interface (and not compatible with it) and was
| around the time audio started being integrated into motherboards.
|
| This is also around the time it started to be common for pre-
| built systems to integrate functionality into the motherboard,
| such as VGA, audio, USB, and in some cases even AGP video all as
| part of a chipset.
|
| The peak of PC audio probably matches the peak of the "HTPC" wave
| that happened in the first half of the 2000's - PCs designed to
| be put under your TV and replace your stereo.
|
| But also, laptops started getting cheaper and more popular as the
| late 90's turned into the 2000's and beyond - where integration
| of components was even more valued. Then smartphones started to
| take over in the 2010's.
|
| The culture is different now. These days, the young people don't
| have stereos anymore, they might have at best have a TV soundbar
| or some really good wireless speakers, or a couple of bluetooth
| speakers, and the phone is the centerpiece of the personal audio
| experience now.
|
| Hi-Fi that's not dedicated to making your car rattle or be
| \blasted at 500w-per-channel volume over a bar/club PA speaker is
| dead.
|
| Desktop PCs are for businesses which need only good enough audio
| for business purposes, and gamers who probably want to spend
| money on a GPU over audio.
| fffobar wrote:
| What does a sound card actually do, besides ADC and DAC?
| mav88 wrote:
| The Aureal had hardware 3d audio which has yet to be matched
| today.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| desktop decline. people got used to the sound quality of laptop,
| smart phone and tablet. there's also AirPods type of headphone
| for people who want to enjoy their music via laptop, smart phone
| and tablet.
| unfocused wrote:
| I think your comment hits the mark. People now listen to their
| music off their phones (headphone or bluetooth speakers), or on
| the go in their car. Nobody sits down to a desktop to listen to
| music.
|
| Don't forget about bluetooth speakers, etc where the source is
| your phone or laptop.
| golergka wrote:
| There's still a lot of dedicated audio interfaces for people who
| are involved in making music. However, most of those people are
| using Macs because of how better CoreAudio compared to ASIO or
| anything else, and subsequently, because most of software is
| developed and tested first and foremost for Macs thanks to
| network effects. And most mac users have Macbooks, which means
| that majority of usually used audio interfaces are external ones.
|
| As for people who just listen to music, IMO, built-in audio
| interfaces or just digital Bluetooth headphones have been good
| enough for a very long-time in digital-audio conversion.
| MisterTea wrote:
| tl;dr Higher integration and faster CPU's killed them.
|
| In the early days of PC's most EVERY peripheral was provided by
| an IO expansion card save for the keyboard. My 386 had a 16-bit
| multi-IO ISA board that provided the essential coms ports: ATA,
| floppy, serial, parallel. You purchased a VGA card and then a
| sound card. You had at least 2 or three ISA cards because your
| motherboard was taken up by all the CPU, FPU, RAM, and essential
| control logic chips. My second 486, a DX2 66MHz, had the ATA,
| serial, parallel and floppy ports on-board which amazed me as it
| eliminated a whole ISA board. (Now everything fits on a single
| silicon die...)
|
| Early on-board audio was usually a sound card soldered the the
| motherboard. Then Intel developed AC'97 which integrated standard
| audio into the south-bridge. Coincidentally that made Microsoft's
| life easier as all the PC's they were running on would use this
| standard meaning all they had to do was provide AC'97 drivers and
| everyone with an Intel machine had sound. No more competing 3rd
| party audio api's from Creative, et al. it was all Wintel. PC
| builders could now provide multimedia PC's for cheaper prices
| with audio by default. Also, USB happened which allowed people to
| plug in things without opening cases and fiddling with circuit
| boards which is alien to many.
|
| And as CPU's became faster, the need for dedicated DSP processors
| to handle audio processing or synthesis is eliminated. You can
| now run a whole DAW complete with synth, sample playback, effects
| and mixing in real-time on a cheap general purpose off the shelf
| computer with no special hardware.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Creative, that is a name I haven't heard in a while. I'm old
| enough to remember limos pulling up to the (to be bought by
| Creative) EMU office in Scotts Valley by the likes of Trent
| Reznor to play with the latest sampler. So much gear envy back
| then. It's so cool to live in 'my' future where I can get a used
| Pigments soft synth for $75 and Ableton lite for $15 on a niche
| message board of people from around the world and buy from
| someone anywhere in the world, pay digitally, and in less than an
| hour have as much music production as $50,000+ would have bought
| me in the 90s. It's so crazy to live in what to me is the future.
| rektide wrote:
| One thing not really mentioned is in threads is...software. Every
| soundcard used to compete by trying to offer better 3d or better
| effects processing than the others. Game developes had a half
| dozen sound sdk's they could write their game audio for (EAX,
| Aureal... I dunno there's probably _at least_ half a dozen).
| Cards competed on features. In the pro segments, literal
| megabytes of midi sample space & dsp coprocessors attracted
| audiences. Each of these tended to have one of any number of
| software toolkits... so you needed games or apps to all get
| onboard too. Many SDKs had software fallbacks so many users would
| even care that they didnt have Aureal3D support or whatever.
|
| The actual advantages of doing things in hardware quickly faded,
| as cpus became ever more powerful. But just as much, the various
| apis didnt really ascend, or their technologies (head-related
| transfer function) got swallowed/mainstreamed. Namely
| DirectSound3D (1996), which grew various hardware offloads (EAX),
| and eventually because DirectX Audio. The pressure to compete
| deflated under thus mainstreamification... few people wanted to
| the extra 100 miles to support bespoken fancy hardware
| capabilities 0.01% of gamers might have, when they got 90% there
| using the common denominator.
|
| I dont actually know what folks like gamedevs do now. Both Xbox &
| Playstation say they tick a lot of really good 3d audio boxes,
| they support an array of common 3d audio standards that I dont
| really know that much about. I'd love to know more about hoe the
| gamedevs feature-sets & capabilities have evolved over time...
| most coverage is alas ultra consumer facing & abstract; getting
| some intimicacy with technically what is possible now vs then
| would be fascinating.
|
| I do think Creative has continued doing some refinement on their
| dedicated cards, but, like, in general, I think the other answer
| to the question is just that we are damned near perfection. We
| have really smart folk telling us we're making things worse by
| having too high a sample rate (>=192kHz, see Monty's
| https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html & newer
| excellent audio myth videos), there's so little noise left to
| chase out to drive SNR higher, THD is tiny. Many laptops & gaming
| motherboards have really really good audio outputs, which are
| like $4 more cost for the person making the system for nearly
| flawless output, and even cheap stuff has gotten quite fine (but
| boy can engineers still cut corners & create trashfire designs,
| especially on low end systems, but it's gotten harder!).
|
| What's kind of exciting in the past half decade is that Intel
| realized that on-card processing needed effective commodification
| if it was to survive. Each chip/driver maker making their own
| bespoke solutions like back the 90s was going nowhere & the only
| effective pushback against forever doing more & more on the cpu
| was to make the sounnd hardware more usable, easier to implement
| consistently & well. To that end, they did the amazing working of
| making SOF (sound open firmware) which is an implementable
| reference firmware anyone can use & ship for sound devices. It's
| a community effort now, to make a orchestrator/controller that
| implement commom driver interfaces, & figures out how to use a
| slate of DSPs effectively to do thr job, which under the hood is
| what soundcards have been. Now everyone can work together to use
| these DSPs effectively & well, whatever chips eith ehatever DSPs
| on them you happen to have. AMD is one other noted user, I forget
| who else.
|
| https://thesofproject.github.io/latest/introduction/index.ht...
| mmastrac wrote:
| USB killed it. Keep your signal digital until you hit the
| speakers (or a short audio cable). No interference, 44.1kHz from
| end-to-end (or more).
|
| If you don't like the DAC in the headphones, you can also find a
| high-quality USB DAC and use the audio cable from there.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > you can also find a high-quality USB DAC
|
| For anyone curious, check out Schiit Audio. I have the
| Magnius/Modius paired with Sennheiser HD660s headphones and I
| couldn't be happier. JDS Labs Atom is also a good choice.
| jgauth wrote:
| > No interference
|
| This has not been my experience at all. For my 5" powered
| studio monitors, the _only_ way to get a interference-free
| signal from my desktop computer was with an optical cable to an
| external DAC.
| wheels wrote:
| That's probably a grounding problem, and was probably just
| coincidentally broken since optical cables don't carry
| electrical signals, and hence can't be a part of ground
| loops.
| orangepurple wrote:
| You may have a ground loop and that needs to be fixed
| dheshhdhshd wrote:
| Can you please tell me what optical cable you used? Struggled
| with this issue for years and if an optical cable somewhere
| in the chain can fix my problem i'd love to buy one.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| GP probably has a sound card with optical output and
| speakers with optical input. This is usually called Toslink
| or SP/DIF (the latter may refer to a coax link - wired so
| won't help with ground loops).
|
| The fiber is standard and you don't need any fancy Monster
| fiber costing $100 a foot.
| sigstoat wrote:
| there's basically only one kind of optical cable used in
| consumer audio (S/PDIF+TOSLINK, or however you want to
| refer to it). the trick is to arranging for both ends to
| use it.
| linedash wrote:
| You're giving me flashbacks to the stupid amount of time it
| took for me to identify a coil whine issue on my motherboard
| that gets worse when the CPU is in power saving mode.
|
| I 'worked around' the issue for the longest time by leaving
| covid based processing going on folding@home, which would
| force my CPU into turbo mode.
|
| Eventually I found out that if I disabled cstates, it mostly
| went away.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Hot glue on the coil should shut it up
| [deleted]
| squarefoot wrote:
| As others replied, you may have grounding problems, that is,
| either the lack of grounding or too much of it (ground loop).
| An effective way to solve the problem is to isolate the
| signal by putting an audio transformer in between the outputs
| and the amplifier (or amplified speakers), one for each
| output. I've done this for desktops and laptops and it
| brought the noises to zero. Just make sure the transformers
| are of decent quality and suitable for audio.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| They're commodity items that eventually get folded into the main
| CPU to reduce costs for manufacturing. This is the majority of
| the market.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| What DSP does the OP-1 use?
| Merad wrote:
| At least in terms of gaming I think multi-core CPUs killed them.
| A big argument for sound cards used to be that they'd give you
| higher quality audio and use less CPU. I can remember benchmarks
| from the mid 2000s showing less CPU usage with a dedicated sound
| card vs onboard sound. But by the time you get to the early 2010s
| anyone building a mid to high end gaming PC was using a quad core
| CPU, and with 4+ cores it's really hard to care if onboard sound
| is using a few percent extra CPU.
|
| And while 3d audio is/was a cool concept, most people don't
| really have a sound system that will really take advantage of it.
| Even most "serious gamers" that I know use headphones or stereo
| speakers... now that I think about it I'm pretty sure I'm the
| only person in my friend group with a 5.1 speaker setup on my PC.
| modeless wrote:
| There are lots of complex reasons people are postulating here,
| but I think it's pretty simple. The CPU can do good enough audio
| rendering without hardware acceleration. The CPU can't do good
| enough graphics rendering without hardware acceleration. So video
| accelerators stayed, and sound accelerators died.
|
| Add-on sound devices still exist, but they are simple because
| they don't include extensive hardware acceleration anything like
| what a GPU has. In fact, if you want hardware acceleration for
| audio processing algorithms today, like really fancy 3D sound
| propagation or something, GPUs would actually be great at that,
| and they support digital audio output too.
| saltcured wrote:
| Yes, I think this is about right. I see a lot of threads
| focusing on APIs and ignoring another thing that happened right
| around the late 1990s to early 2000s: MMX introduced SIMD to
| the PC platform. Suddenly real-time DSP algorithms were
| feasible for playback and synthesis on the host CPU instead of
| requiring a peripheral with an embedded coprocessor. This
| allowed soundcards to be refactored as "just" hardware IO
| channels, with other signal processing effects happening in the
| application.
|
| At roughly the same time, there were more peripheral buses like
| USB and Firewire being introduced, which meant that an add-on
| peripheral did not need to be an internal ISA/PCI card in order
| to have sufficient bandwidth for rich audio streams. These
| external devices could also be built with lower
| noise/interference compared to the boards inside a computer.
|
| And of course, silicon integration always increased so that the
| bundled onboard IO chip became good enough for many users. So,
| add-on peripherals had to move up market or into niche
| settings. That is a bit like how the iGPU in Intel CPUs got rid
| of the market for basic VGA/XGA/etc. graphics cards for office
| machines.
| jensgk wrote:
| USB-based external DAC's took over. They very good now a days.
| Head over to audiosciencereview.com to see lots of DAC reviews,
| technical info and discussions.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Better than very good. I've just bought a Topping D90SE for my
| studio. It kills professional studio DACs from ten years ago at
| a fraction of the cost.
| peteforde wrote:
| Former MT-32 and CM-64 owner, here!
|
| For what it's worth, if you have a small discretionary budget, I
| would recommend a "top of the low-end" DAC to anyone who listens
| to a lot of music. I "did my own research" and concluded that for
| me, the Topping D10s USB DAC was the correct amount of gadget. It
| has RCA outputs and supports 384kHz audio, which needs to be
| enabled in your sound settings.
|
| When I got it set up, it was as if my previously disappointing
| desk stereo speakers and preamp combo took a great sigh of relief
| and the sound opened up. Everything sounds more defined, I can
| hear where the instruments are positioned in the soundstage, and
| I am now one of those people who appreciates Bandcamp allowing
| FLAC downloads. For me, this was worth CAD$139.
|
| https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08CVBKHFX/ <- currently
| "unavailable" but likely easy to locate via search
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I appreciate the offer, but I'm not looking for any products.
| Rather, I'm interested in the historical events that led to the
| present circumstances.
|
| Also, I'm certainly a fan of your romplers. Now if only I had
| the discretionary budget to find a couple of those in working
| order.
| analog31 wrote:
| I've tested USB audio adaptors, ranging from cheapies from
| Amazon, to a PreSonus recording interface. In fact, without
| resorting to really fancy measurement gear, an audio adaptor is
| close to the only thing good enough to test an audio adaptor.
| I've also tested the audio output of phones, built-in PC audio
| jack, etc.
|
| I use PC audio to test analog audio circuits that I make, so I've
| made it my business to know the quality of my measurements.
|
| I've also checked out the specs on the chips used in those
| devices. The delta sigma conversion technique is one of the
| wonders of the modern world.
|
| The fact is that the audio quality coming out of those devices is
| stunning, and probably doesn't need to be better. I can see where
| a recording studio might want to spend more on "overkill" to make
| the artifacts of their digital interface a non-issue, but for the
| rest of us, we're living in a golden age of audio.
| an_aparallel wrote:
| HI HN, long time reader - first post I felt super compelled to
| respond to.
|
| This is a massive bugaboo in the audio industry in my opinion.
|
| I have always been a PCI soundcard user - and still am to this
| day, but industry trends are stopping this. I think a big part of
| this is due to laptops/ipads and the like becoming more popular
| devices, as well as from a useability standpoint - companies
| optimise for succesful adoption into a users system - than
| technical specifications.
|
| I started my DAW with a Terratec soundcard with midi + stereo
| audio ins and outs roughly 20 years ago.
|
| Fastforward 7 years - i bought an early USB interface - the NI
| Audio Kontrol 1 to use with a laptop. I could run everything on
| it - take it out and about - cool!!
|
| Fastworward another few years - and i got more serious about
| audio and bought a Lynx PCIe AES card (now without midi) - to use
| with an Apogee Rosetta 800 (8 in / 8 out). Now we're getting
| there. But - not an all in one solution.
|
| In 2022 - surprisingly - the only (?) companies doing full PCIe
| audio solutions are Lynx and RME. In a fresh session in FL Studio
| or Ableton - with a sample buffer rate of 64 (the lowest) i enjoy
| latency of 0.72m/s. This cant be beaten by USB. However - that's
| not a deal breaker for most people sadly.
|
| It greatly saddens me that audio in general is a second class
| citizen with regards to tech advancement. It still blows my mind
| that the Atari STE with MIDI in built onto its circuit still
| thwarts the tightness in the midi department - of a brand new
| full specced blazing machine. We need more development for
| Realtime O/S in the midi world.
| yardie wrote:
| It went from $30 PCI card with a $10BOM to a <$1BOM chip directly
| on the motherboard.
| fortym2 wrote:
| Who needs better audio still looks for dedicated sound cards,
| *but* external.
|
| For example if you produce music, you probably are good with an
| external USB audio interface like a Focusrite Scarlett.
| yread wrote:
| I have an external soundcard but don't use it as the DAC in my
| laptop is now good enough that I don't hear the difference.
| Either the laptops have better chips or my ears got worse
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Even then people are buying an external audio interface as much
| or more for latency improvements as opposed to sound
| improvement.
| fortym2 wrote:
| Yes, the latency improvement is very true
| smoe wrote:
| And for connectivity. Even for the small band I was in, doing
| "home" recording we had ~10 microphones and 2-3 direct line-
| ins set up recording simultaneously trough an external
| interface and out to 5 headphones or two different sets of
| speakers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. I've been needing better audio
| quality from my machine than it can produce, but it's actually
| pretty hard to figure out how to accomplish that if you don't
| already know.
|
| Been through three different external audio devices, and
| they've all sucked. I'll try yours.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| This is exactly correct. For most folks, whatever sound the
| integrated card makes is enough. Until you are producing music,
| that is - and then, the external has easy connections for the
| equipment.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| AC97 I. e. onboard audio chips becoming good enough for 99% of
| the people.
| smm11 wrote:
| Sound cards were a thing because DOS/Windows was a thing.
|
| In the Mac/Amiga/non-DOS world sound was good enough very early.
| As soon as we said "we need sound," it was there, as long as you
| weren't on DOS.
|
| The Amiga Video Blaster card was a thing, too. Your
| Android/iOS/PalmOS device surpassed that long ago.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Creative still makes very high quality discrete soundcards, they
| just suffered a combination of on-board audio being enough for
| the average and wireless headphones not needing a DAC. Also my
| father's generation was super into audio and had lots of
| disposable income even for middle class people to invest in
| audiophile gear, today that income bracket is very very gone, so
| the markets are much smaller for gadgetheads to spend money on
| stuff like that.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| A couple of reasons:
|
| - During the MS-DOS era, there wasn't really a standard API for
| sound, so using a cheap, off-brand sound chip (including anything
| that might be integrated) often meant compatibility problems.
| Even though it might not necessarily have offered the highest
| quality sound, Creative's Sound Blaster line was the gold
| standard for compatibility during this time. Standardized sound
| APIs have largely eliminated this issue.
|
| -Throughout the '90s, music for games (and a number of other
| applications) was distributed as MIDI (or MIDI-like) instructions
| to be generated by a synthesizer, and the quality of the music
| was very much dependent on the synthesizer used. The Roland Sound
| Canvas series was the gold standard at the time (in part due to
| its quality, and in part because that's what the composers
| themselves used), but it was very expensive and out of reach to
| the mass market. Software synthesizers were either too slow, or
| the quality sucked. That gave an opportunity for sound card
| manufacturers like Creative to offer higher-quality hardware
| synthesizers on their sound cards than what cheap/integrated
| cards could do. These days, most audio is PCM, and hardware is
| perfectly capable of high-quality software sound synthesis, so
| hardware synthesis has become a non-issue and modern consumer
| sound hardware doesn't even have hardware synthesis capabilities
| anymore.
|
| - During the '00s, sound cards began to offer accelerated
| environmental and positional audio (e.g., Aureal3D, Creative
| EAX), which games quickly adopted to improve the sense of
| immersion. However, changes in the Windows audio architecture
| introduced with Windows Vista broke this functionality without a
| replacement. Advances in CPU hardware have since allowed this
| type of processing to be done on the CPU (e.g., XAudio 3D, OpenAL
| Soft) with acceptable performance.
|
| In the current era, we do have dedicated soundcards, although not
| in the form of PCIe add-in boards. External DACs (either
| dedicated USB, or integrated into a display or AV receiver) are
| popular, as are the DACs used by wireless/USB headphones. Also,
| there has been some work done to utilize the computational
| capability of GPUs for real-time audio ray tracing.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I think all the innovation moved to the creator/professional
| stuff. You can buy amazing sound gear that interfaces with the
| computer, controls stuff in Ableton, etc. For me at least, I've
| chosen to go with studio monitor type speakers from the
| professional audio world rather than home hi fi stuff. I suspect
| others are similar, a small 4 channel mixer with dac and other
| cool interface stuff is common.
| ksec wrote:
| On-Board was good enough and cheap enough. It was as simple as
| that. A lot of the Audio processing moved to the CPU. Dedicated
| Sound Processor Effect requires Gaming support.
|
| There was also Aureal. Both Creative and Aureal had their own
| specific API to try and create a similar moat like Glide from
| 3DFx but failed. And then Realtek took over.
|
| Creative could have competed with onboard Audio as well. But they
| were too worry about losing their Sound Blaster Revenue, so they
| somehow diverged into other things like GPU ( 3DLabs ), MP3
| players, Speakers, etc etc. And every single one of them failed.
|
| If you are looking for modern Audio Engineering, you could look
| at PS5. But powerful DSP isn't exactly rocket science anymore. A
| lot of the improvement has to do with software.
|
| Creative used to be the pride of Singapore. It is sad the company
| was badly managed and never made the leap to the next stage.
| pengo wrote:
| Improvements in architecture, bus speeds and external ports mean
| there now no need for audio to be handled by an internal card;
| Thunderbolt or USB is more than adequate. This has moved the
| focus to "external soundcards", more commonly referred to as
| audio interfaces.
| spiffytech wrote:
| Two big things that I think contribute to this:
|
| 1) Most people are happy with good enough. To most people's ears,
| speaker quality makes a bigger difference than audio output, and
| people already settle there. Furthermore, when iTunes was a big
| deal it turned out people got accustomed to low bit rates and
| mediocre equipment and thought it sounded better than the good
| stuff, because it's how they expected their music to sound.
|
| 2) With most computing moving to laptops and then to mobile,
| people generally don't have a choice about the audio processing
| technology inside their computer.
| happymellon wrote:
| Beats probably helped with the first one as well. That was 2006
| that they started to teach people that muffled sounds with
| exaggerated bass is what it should sound like.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Like others have said, it's just people who want that kind of
| thing don't do cards any more, they do external "audio
| interfaces".
|
| I have a Scarlett attached to the underside of my desk with a
| pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones and a Monoprice Stage Right
| condenser mic on a desk stand.
|
| I'm guessing the inner-PC card space has a bit too much of a EM
| noise problem for people who care about quality higher than
| integrated sound can provide (which is pretty good these days
| anyway) and external devices have room for the inputs people
| actually want.
| jimlikeslimes wrote:
| Does the Scarlett drive the hd600s nicely for you? (I'm
| assuming something like the 4i4). I'm in the process of
| upgrading and was looking at a Scarlett audio interface for
| creating mixtapes with an external DJ mixer.
|
| I was going to use a different headphone amp with the hd600s
| and a modmic for general listening and calls though. Sounds
| like I might be able to drop that 2nd amp (I was thinking about
| the soundblaster x4)
|
| I guess I'll get the Scarlett first and listen.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have a first generation 2i2, I believe, and it is a
| noticeable improvement from trying to plug HD600 into a
| random audio jack which were obviously not able to actually
| drive them properly in general.
|
| You should be fine dropping the additional headphone amp,
| which I think beyond the Scarlett or similar audio interface
| will perhaps be different depending on the amp, but not
| clearly making up for a deficiency in interface power.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| As an aside, the hardware/driver support for sound cards is
| terrible on modern Windows.
|
| There's this trusty Creative Audigy Rx that I nabbed from a
| closing down sale at an electronics retailer. Poetically, both
| are facing the same fate.
|
| I built a Ryzen 7 machine and installed Windows 10. Whilst
| installing the CD drivers for the soundcard Windows 10 BSOD'd and
| rebooted. Not to be deterred, I tried the latest downloadable
| drivers (marked as Windows 8 compatible) but it is all WDM so
| surely OK? Not so. Another BSOD.
|
| There was no help to be found online so I very reluctantly gave
| up. Now it lives in the retail packaging somewhere in my house,
| the bright and elaborate box promising an audible experience that
| exists only in my mind.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| years ago I purchased a Create Sound Blaster ZxR.
|
| Windows _never_ worked well with it. A reboot may or may not
| have my sound card undetected due to some bug, I think it was
| related to their PlugNPlay, but I don't recall.
|
| Until they completely dropped support for it, so then I just
| flat couldn't use it. And Linux support for it never really
| came around (maybe now? no idea).
|
| So my policy now is fuck Creative. I purchased good money for a
| top-of-the-line sound card that never worked well and rather
| than fixing it they dropped support for the very next version
| of Windows.
|
| I just use my motherboard audio because I don't have to deal
| with that shit and if I do ever purchase another separate
| soundcard it sure as shit won't be Creative.
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