Support NeoGAF

[Anthropic]

Here's my situation:

Ever since the April Intel CPU price drop, I've been meaning to build a new PC (my current system was a socket 939 Athlon 64 system). My hesitation was that there were no Vista drivers for my M-Audio Audiophile USB yet.

Friday night my mobo died and the issue was forced, so I built a new quad core Vista rig, and now I need to figure out what I'm going to do about audio.

I originally bought the M-Audio box because I listen to a lot of music and I liked the idea of an outboard box with a 1/4" headphone jack, a real volume knob, and real RCA analog outputs.

I don't have a digital receiver. I'm currently using a stereo Onkyo receiver with a pair of Paradigm Atoms and a Polk PSW-10 sub. I like the idea of staying with stereo rather than moving to surround. I like the idea that if I find an old Marantz amp at a thrift store I could use that if I wanted and my room is not conducive to surround speaker placement.

I love the sound of the M-Audio box, but the drivers have always driven me batty, so I also bought an Audigy 2 ZS, not knowing about it's battyness with converting 44.1Khz to 48Khz internally...

Eventually new drivers came out for the M-Audio box and it finally worked decently, but I constantly had problems where the little control panel applet to configure the box would say it wasn't attached, while it was clearly playing sound.

I love the sound of the thing, but I'm fed up with M-Audio's consistent issues with producing quality drivers and updating them regularly.

Currently, under Vista, I'm using my Audigy 2, and I'm not liking the sound quality. It lacks the warmth and detail of the M-Audio box.

So, what I want is a high quality sound card in the $100-$200 range.

Here are the options I can see at the moment:

1. Wait for M-Audio to produce Vista drivers for the M-Audio box and deal with the sound of the Audigy until then. This would save me some dough.

2. Buy a Chaintech AV-710 and some sort of outboard DAC. Then the question becomes what DAC.

3. Buy one of those awesome looking Onkyo sound cards. The idea of a card based on a well-supported chip (the VIA Envy24HT) combined with a well-known nice DAC and an Onkyo designed analog section sounds awesome. This way, I could just use the VIA reference drivers. I love the idea of a sound card with RCA outs.

4. Buy some sort of pro-sumer home recording interface like one of Echo's products. I really don't care about recording or need to pay for good recording, but these devices tend to have good sounding output.

5. Buy a Chaintech AV-710 and a digital receiver.

What do you guys think? Any better ideas?

 

[LuCkymoON]

I thought sound cards were useless under vista?

 

[Anthropic]

Supposedly, the audio mixer in Vista is actually much better than XP's mixer...

Anyways, right now I'm leaning toward the Onkyo SE-90 card...It's got the Wolfson WM8716 DAC, which is supposed to be very nice, and it's a nice, no-nonsense 2 channel card. I don't need any of the multichannel stuff that the SE-150 and SE-200 have.

 

[Anthropic]

Bumping this for the afternoon crowd.

 

[Pimpbaa]

I thought sound cards were useless under vista?

Hardware mixing is dead in Vista (which is important in games that use a lot of voices at the same time), unless more developers use OpenAL. You still have stuff like the quality of the output from the DAC and whatnot that will make different sound solutions sound better than one another. I remember the onboard sound in my previous motherboard and my old dell laptop, they both did not have any bass or treble controls in the windows audio control panel. My previous motherboard kinda did in the nvidia and realtek sound control panel, but it never sounded like real control over the bass and treble. It just made the audio sound wierd. I have no idea how the realtek azalia chip sounds on my current motherboard (using a creative X-Fi instead).