obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
Nice machine!
I was honestly surprised by what the DLX (and entire STRIX line) have "under the hood" myself - I had seen a few motherboard makers throwing USB audio controllers on islands on their boards, which was more of a marketing stunt than anything else, but seeing it done on a PCIe card...:rolleyes:
Especially from Asus, who (if I'm not mistaken) were the first (or at least one of the first) to really push for high quality headphone amplifiers built-in to internal cards (on the Xonar STX line). They originally used a TI IC amp (the same as on the ZxR and a few other cards), but I knew some of the less expensive Xonar boards didn't offer that (primarily due to cost I'd guess - when the entire packaged product has to be $30 you can't really throw a $5 IC at it willy-nilly). But the DLX is just entirely underwhelming for what they want - the ZxR and Xonar boards are significantly more "board" for the money.
That's a little bit different. In the 1990s hardware-accelerated sound, either as MIDI or as a DSP co-processor was the state of the art, and there were competing APIs to plug various applications into these hardware devices. Sound Blaster was one such option, but there were other competitors (like Aureal). Many older games rely on this hardware-accelerated sound to have proper positional audio, or to have higher quality audio, and for a time the stand-alone soundcard was on its way to being elevated to the same level as the stand-alone 3D graphics accelerator. Some of this stuff is proprietary, some of it is closed-source, but not all of it was explicitly monetized, for example h/w based DirectSound 3D didn't require any additional buy-in as long as you had a compatible adapter (or wrapper), but more complete EAX support required a compatible Sound Blaster (e.g. Audigy).
The various "other software" that manufacturers have offered over the years is usually an up-sell feature - the stuff you list are examples of that, but they're somewhat of an anchronism today. Back in the day, soundcards usually had pretty robust DSPs on them, and if they weren't doing anything for a game, those DSPs were generally sitting idle. So why not let the consumer use them for more features? Why not try to tap into the mutlimedia/home theater market too?
Nowadays, however, hardware-accelerated audio is all but dead and buried. Microsoft pretty much saw to that with Windows Vista's redesigned audio subsystem. This isn't all doom and gloom - a lot of those hardware-accelerated platforms weren't known for their rock-solid stability or ease of use, whereas modern software-based solutions deliver a very consistent experience across a huge range of machines/platforms (and yes I mean consoles too). So that leaves the soundcard as basically a glorified codec - you still need audio in/out from the machine, and a way to plug everything up, and that's basically all a soundcard gets you. But that doesn't stop "them" from trying to include various multimedia features in the driver - the processing power is still there, the connectivity is still there, so why not? (and if you're wondering about those hardware-based titles in the modern era, wrappers have been available for years now)
I would generally agree with you - it's a lot of fluffy effects that don't do much for the end result. I will say that over the years there have been a number of nice surround or HRTF simulacra released by various sources - Creative's CMSS was nice, as was Razer ESP (I am not sure how closely related to the newer Razer Surround this is), and of course the Dolby and DTS suites generally have some nice components to them (they vary from interface to interface, my understanding is its based on how much the OEM wants to pay in licence fees).
I think ever since Creative got busted on the original Audigy (which really wasn't bad, but they were still lying through their teeth about how good it was), soundcard makers have paid a lot more attention to audio quality if they're going to ask $100+ for a card. Most of the higher-end Creative, Asus, Auzen, M-Audio, etc boards of the last ~10 years usually offer pretty nice DACs (at least for the main L/R output), and generally decent build quality. Yes, they are mass-market products that are built on an assembly line and won't feature magic wires, caps, etc as found in more "hi-fi" parts, but at the same time they're dramatically improved over the junk we lived with in the mid-90s.
It's probably a codec, but it may have an external DAC for some/all output channels depending on the board (some manufacturers have done this as an up-sell - if you're using it as a digital source that's immaterial though). As far as the interference/noise thing, in my experience it's really hit-or-miss - I've seen cheap boards that work just fine, and expensive boards that can't get it together, and I'm inclined to believe it as much of a product-to-product variation as it is a more specific example-to-example variation. These boards aren't being QA'd for absolute audio quality, and the tolerances that whatever OEM or IHV will accept are probably really loose (I would not be surprised at all if their limit is basically "does it actually pass sound?" in some cases). A lot of more specialized manufacturers (this is where your custom PC builder stuff usually comes in, as opposed to the boards that go into Dells, HPs, etc) have jumped on the "hi-fi headphone" bandwagon in recent years, and really stepped things up for integrated audio (this is not the first time this craze has swept the nation - years ago it was home theater and we similarly saw a rash of premium motherboards with premium integrated audio). Given how little a "soundcard" actually has to do these days, though, there's not a lot of argument to be made for anything but a really nice codec with good I/O, and if you're using it as a digital transport, even that can waver a bit.
