Audio

[greeg]

Forumsters,it appears that most motherboards these days have onboard sound,namely 5.1 digital surround sound.It's somethimg that i have no need for so,are there motherboards available without this feature.I was looking at socket 478,with the 875 Intel chipset.Any feedback welcome.Thanks.

 

[Crashman]

Well, you don't need it, so get it anyway. These parts are so inexpensive that companies no longer bother to make boards without them. In fact, it would cost them MORE to make 2 versions of the board, than to put the hardware on every board.

So if you dislike it, disable it.

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[greeg]

Crashman,i didn't realise it could be disabled,that's good.It's bad it has to be paid for in the first place as i doubt if there will be any quality.High quality sound is expensive.Regards

 

[Crashman]

Yes, but what's really bad is that it would cost you MORE to be without onboard sound, since it would require the company to make an entire production run of the soundless boards, pay for warehousing, the distribution cost, etc.

Now, as to quality sound costing money, that's because of extortion and such. Creative has the market locked up, their $150 cards cost no more to produce than their $50 cards.

You can get high quality sound nearly for free with nVidia chipset, but those are only available for AMD processors. The nForce APU is one of the best on the market. Unfortunately it also cost money to convert digital signals to analog signals, and most boards come with cheap codecs to do that, so you're only option on these boards, if you want quality sound, is to use digital connections exclusively.

Anyway, decent sound comes from well designed, inexpensive codecs. Good sound comes from better quality codecs. What you REALLY pay for in a high end card is the DSP, and that's where companies rip you off badly.

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[greeg]

I take on board what you say,but you can't get high quality sound for free.This is a matter of fact and not opinion.It's why people spend thousand of $ on sound reproduction equipment,as opossed to hundreds of $.Regards

 

[Crashman]

Right, but you have to remember how limitted the function of computer sound devices is. The basic codecs output an analog signal from a digital one. The digital signal is either produced by the CPU (with high overhead and low quality) or a DSP (with low overhead and high quality). The DSP is expensive to develope and cheap to produce, so that producing and selling them in large quanities make them very inexpensive. This is the best indication of how badly Creative, a large scale producer, is ripping people off.

You see, you're not looking at a home stereo. Your not looking at a head unit with AM/FM radio and amplifier. You're looking at basically an unamplified head component for a high end stereo, MINUS the tuner, digital display, switches, and half the hardware needed to handle the sound!

You could build an outstanding home stereo with a $200 head unit, $350 amplifier, $200 CD component, etc. The speakers would be the most expensive part. Quadrupling the price of those components would yield improvements too small for most users to decipher, often less than 1%.

And the high end Creative cards can't even compete with that $200 head unit, not to mention the fact that around $150 of the hardware from that head unit is not needed.

I'm guessing that at the scale Creative does things, the Audigy 2 should cost around $20, the Audigy 2 platinum around $40, to produce.

Look at how little goes into their Live Drive 2! You realize that little card with a plastic faceplate cost over $100 to replace? And has fewer parts than a $30 cheap video card?

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