How good is the TBSC?

[perdomot]

I'm a newbie with all the audio lingo like DACs and was curious how the TBSC rates for music. I know the Audigy series is better for games. Thanks.

 

[lan]

My personal scale of 1 to 10. It's not linear and it's based on clarity/detail not other attributes of sound quality.

SBLive =1
TBSC = 3
Revo 7.1 and other Envy based cards ~= 5
emu 0404 = 7
emu 1212m = 7.5

 

[AdamWill]

ian: have you heard an nforce2 motherboard with 'soundstorm'? I've never listened to a really good soundcard, I don't buy expensive enough speakers to justify it, but just out of interest I'd like to know where it lands on your scale, if you've listened to such a beast. (My motherboard is such a thing, supposedly it's better than the hideous tinny interference-ridden soup that is most onboard audio). Random comparison articles I found through Google appear to suggest it's about as good as an Audigy 2, which by the looks of this forum is...um...OK...ish.

 

[Audio18]

A TBSC falls pretty short behind my REVO 5.1 card. The TBSC just basically lacks more detail, smooth midrange, and it can have nasty bass peaks (comparing to a high-end card of coarse). For a inexpensive card -- it's a very good value, just a bit less better than a Audigy II for music, but, I've never heard the Aud. so I can't really comment on that.

 

[Imyourzero]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lan My personal scale of 1 to 10. It's not linear and it's based on clarity/detail not other attributes of sound quality. SBLive =1 TBSC = 3 Revo 7.1 and other Envy based cards ~= 5 emu 0404 = 7 emu 1212m = 7.5

Lan, have you ever heard the Philips Acoustic Edge soundcard? I was wondering where it would fall in your rankings...

 

[lan]

AdamWill, sorry I've never heard a soundstorm before. I have been AMD less since 1.4ghz Tbird.

 

[Helter Skelter]

re: soundstorm

The appeal of Soundstorm has less to do with it's analog quality, which is far from great (being that most implementations use the lackluster ALC650 chip and some less than wonderful DACs), and more to do with the fact that it means that you get realtime 5.1 Dolby Digital encoding. This is primarily a really cool thing for gamers who want to get positional sound in games with a nice home theater system that'll kick the crap out of most any computer speaker system you can buy.

You get no benefit out of Soundstorm by using the analog outputs. Digital 5.1 output for games is where it really shines. For music you're better off using 2-channel PCM sound (Dolby Digital is a lossy compressed format, remember) through the digital output to an external DAC, or getting a good analog card like the 0404. Personally, I do own a Soundstorm capable motherboard (Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, a fantastic board) as well as the 0404.

 

[AdamWill]

Hmm, that's interesting - I thought I read somewhere that the Soundstorm boards used a different chip to actually process the sound, and the ALC650 was just used to output it. This may be bollocks, though, please tell me if it is

. I have the same motherboard, BTW - I'm very happy with it *except* for the fact that the new BIOS sucks, and it doesn't recognise XP-Ms at all (it just sees them as 'unknown processor', doesn't let you drive them with a low voltage as they're supposed to be driven, and the multipliers are all out of whack). Thanks for the info, in any case. I use the analogue outputs to drive my z-5300s as they don't do decoding and I don't have the money to buy a separate decoder.

 

[Helter Skelter]

No, that's true, the Soundstorm DSP does all the work, but actual analog quality is crippled by the ACL650. It's still better than most other onboard solutions.

And seeing the XP-m as "unknown processor" and not letting you use the low voltages is par for the course, it's a limitation of the chipset itself. There's actually a utility that will allow you to customize what it shows up as, but I forget the name of it. That's what I run in mine (XP-m 2400+ 35watt model at 2.3GHz and 1.7v), in fact. I'm using the stock BIOS, though, and I don't have any issue with the multipliers.

 

[AdamWill]

Some of the multipliers work, but at a certain point they stop working; I think around 13x or so I just don't get 13x at all, I get 6x or 7x or something instead. So because I can't get FSB above 183 stable I'm basically artificially limited with my overclock, which sucks. AFAIK, voltage regulation and processor recognition are features of the board / BIOS and not the chipset; BIOS updates to recognise new proceessors are common (the original BIOS on this board doesn't recognise Semprons, for instance, but later BIOSes do). Voltage regulation is a feature for the motherboard manufacturers to decide, I think, otherwise why do you get different nforce2 boards with vastly different voltage options, and why can you volt mod motherboards? Nah, Asus aren't wriggling out of this one

. It's not really a big deal, as 2.2Ghz is plenty fast enough and even at a pointlessly high 1.6v the system is cool and quiet...it's just a bit annoying

 

[number1sixerfan]

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