Sound cards

[Borrowingsine81]

Im new when it comes to sound cards. Im getting a £200 headset and £150 speakers should i get a powerful sound card for example a card from asus or stick with a built in card on the motherboard?

[jaslion]

No. Soundcards are like the least important part for getting some better sound. Onboard audio is already very good and to get a minuscule difference in quality you have to pay hundreds for a card.

 

Also x money headset x money speakers means literally beyond nothing. What headset and what speakers? There are just bad speakers for that price and good ones.

[Borrowingsine81]

Razer nari ultimate headset

And razer nommo chroma speakers

[Digideath]

I'm using a sound blaster z card. It didnt cost much. It's a great little card. Noticeably clearer and better than my onboard. I have logitech 903 1000watt rms 5.1 surround speakers attached to it and I use razor headphones while playing certain games.

[rice guru]

4 hours ago, Borrowingsine81 said:

Razer nari ultimate headset

And razer nommo chroma speakers

If you have that much to spend on sound look into getting something much better than the Nari and Nommo. The Nari is pretty awful for how much it costs. The Nommo is the same sounds ok until you hear something cheaper and better like some creative options.a soundcard won't really do much to make these sound any better cause they just kinda suck in the first place. The biggest upgrade you can make in audio are the speakers and headphones themselves not really the source gear. 

[H713]

Once you have decent headphones / speakers, then you may consider sound card / audio interface options. Good PCIe interfaces are very expensive. The EVGA Nu Audio is the cheapest PCIe card I would touch (It actually performs very well, which is a bit of a surprise given the manufacturer). Most of the other internal sound cards worth buying are meant for recording and are priced to match.

 

The main advantage to a decent sound card is that the noise floor is usually a lot lower. Contrary to popular belief, this is the case for a good quality PCIe sound card as well. I have a Lynx L22 in my shop PC for example, and it's noise floor (as measured with the Audio Precision) is about as good as it gets. Of course, the L22 also doesn't have a headphone amp and is discontinued- the E22 is the replacement. The Lynx E22 will give you state-of-the art performance on both the AD and DA converters, with very well designed analog circuitry to match, but it is difficult to justify the cost (750 USD if I remember correctly) for most users. That said, if you buy something like the E22, you can expect that sort of thing to last 10+ years- studio technology tends to move pretty slowly, and I would expect that someone who buys an E22 to have it until PCIe is no longer viable.

 

For most people, I'd suggest looking at USB audio interfaces. Some of us over on DiyAudio have done some testing, and it seems that, at present, the MOTU M2 is about the best thing in the $160 range in terms of noise and distortion. It's probably the best bang-per-buck offering. The Focusrite Scarlett is acceptable if you can live with a mediocre headphone amp. Balanced line-level outputs is definitely a huge improvement and is, IMO, worth the cost of admission. This may not be as big a deal for most people, but it gives a lot more flexibility with amplifiers / active monitors. There are some amplifiers (from manufacturers who will remain nameless) that sound amazing but are basically a ground loop in a box and ABSOLUTELY MUST be driven from a balanced source in order to be tolerable.

 

These products typically do not offer 5.1 or 7.1 outputs. This may be a deal breaker for some, though if you really want a good 5.1 or 7.1 output, expect to pay dearly for it. 

 

I usually avoid Creative products like the plague- they've had some really awful software issues in the past, and I haven't been too impressed with their analog stages. They're better than what's built into a motherboard, but they're too expensive for the performance they deliver these days.