obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
Everyone starts somewhere, and admittedly that smiley's actual creation is before my time as well. Head-Fi has been here for a while.
I agree with you on calling BS - probably more likely someone did it first, and everyone is copying it for whatever reason.
:tongue_smile:
Anything worth doing is worth over doing, haha.
Honestly 80+ has been, on the whole, a pretty good thing imho - very few units actually fully fail their specified rating, especially under the new "colors" or "metals" system, and everything is a lot more efficient than it was just a few years ago. Apart from the notoriously awful quality units (e.g. Deer) overall quality has improved a lot too - what you can get for ~$50 these days is just staggering, especially if you go back a few years and consider what used to cost $100+.
Let me bluntly fix that: 90% of the problems people reported [with audio] in XP were Creative Labs related.
Honestly I think it's fair to say that Creative's history of just dreadful drivers and litigious territoriality is what killed hardware audio, and it probably would've happened sooner if the rest of the machine could've gotten there, performance wise, sooner. This isn't to say the hardware underlying a lot of Sound Blaster cards is bad (it isn't, at least on newer ones), but the driver support is just so awful in many cases - honestly I gave up on EAX years ago, despite still using Sound Blaster cards in some of my machines through to present - the constant game crashes, audio drop-outs, instability, etc was just too much of a pain. Nobody else really touched hardware audio in as big a way as Creative, especially after the Aureal thing, largely because of how sue-happy Creative was back in the day. This also isn't to say software audio is bad thing - honestly I would say its been to everyone's benefit in recent years because it lets the hardware people concentrate on good hardware and use a bundled, generic driver that is well supported and documented, and then you have a common software platform that does audio and it just licences out to a lot of places (e.g. Wwise) and is itself well documented and supported. Everything gets towards that "just works" status. Which is a lot nicer than the bad old days of trying to get whatever to recognize, play nice with, etc your Sound Blaster under Windows or DOS.
h34r:Yep. Sad to say, but this really does happen.
SNR numbers went absolutely nuts with soundcards about 15 years ago, and we can thank Creative for that too. I honestly don't remember any cards advertising SNR values until around the time of Live! or Audigy, and of course then there were the lawsuits when Creative couldn't actually back up their claims, and the re-issued specs, and whoever wanted to compete with Creative trying to put up really big numbers as a "ooh aaahh" statement, and on and on. Whether or not the STX can actually hit those numbers is probably debateable - more likely they're taking the specsheet value for the DAC and going with that, and not actually what their implementation can do. But who knows - digital audio has gotten really good in recent years, and it isn't hard to get a good quality device these days.
This is highly variable. Going way back in time, early "surround sound" cards usually only did quad, and that was four full-range channels (4.0). This was not uncommon from Creative, Aureal, Diamond, VIA, etc. Then 5.1 came to the PC (As in, actual 5.1 output; digital bitstreaming for DVD had been available on some cards with digital outputs, but they couldn't decode that bitstream or output the 5.1 - it relied on an external decoder to do that work (and this is of course way back in the day when everything cost a fortune); this is partly why Logitech made so much noise about their higher end Z series doing Dolby decoding for so long), and was usually done on three TRS jacks with the center/sub sharing a jack, which let them maintain some semblance of compatibility with 4.0 systems. The sub on those 4.0 systems is handled by a crossover in the speaker system itself, not on the soundcard. When Creative did 6.1, and later 7.1, on the Audigy 2 and 2 ZS/4 they moved to TRRS jacks for two of the connectors, and embedded the surround rear channels on those - only their own 6.1/7.1 Inspire and Gigaworks systems actually use that wiring, otherwise you had to buy an adapter (it was around $25; people figured out pretty quickly those video camera video + stereo audio cables could do the same thing though). Later 7.1 cards usually offered, as you've pointed out, a quartet of jacks for the front/surround/rear surround + c/sub. I've never seen a card try to embed 2.1 onto a TRRS but maybe its out there. The whole "headphone amp soundcard" is, as far as I'm aware, originally an Asus thing (okay we could argue Razer did it first with Barracuda, but Barracuda doesn't actually have a dedicated amplifier, it just was designed to bundle with some Razer headsets and their quasi-proprietary 7.1 wiring; never heard the headset but the card itself is an exercise in over-engineering and over-building and works great as a source). Of course Creative has their own now too, and big surprise we're back to 5.1 as the top-end for many soundcards (I read somewhere a while ago that 6.1/7.1 is like less than 1% of 1% of actual installed consumer systems, probably because of the physical space requirements more than anything else, there's also not a lot of content, especially if you consider the pre-Blu-ray days (and this still has its fingerprints on today, because if it was never originally available in 6.1 or 7.1, chances are it probably will stay that way)). Back in the day you didn't have separate "headphone out" on the card - you had the "front" or "line out" (lime green in AC'97 compliant coloring - not everyone followed that) which was (at least on paper) to provide for headphones OR stereo speakers. A typical system also had separate mic and line inputs (pink and blue), and then if you were fancy you got some more outputs for surround sound, and if you were really fancy some more inputs for whatever you wanted to use them for. But then you get into plugging in your high impedance and/or low sensitivity headphones and it doesn't sound very good (e.g. it probably won't get loud enough, it may have frequency response anomalies, it may clip, etc), and headphone amplifiers start becoming a serious topic of discussion (and then years and years later the big manufacturers start doing their own canned solutions around Maxim or TI or ESS ICs). I think, and someone can chime in and correct if they want, that by the time Asus, HT Omega, and Creative (and whoever else) did finally get into the world of "headphone amp soundcards" that the headphone amp market itself was already pretty well established (although nothing like it is today), and those cards ended up being more of a niche product than anything else. I say that because they cost a lot and most people that wanted a higher end audio setup from the PC already had a working solution (e.g. the "non headphone amp" cards are usually still great line-out sources or digital sources), and a $200+ soundcard has always been a tough sell in its own right. Now of course that's all changed more recently, as headphones have just become so amazingly popular and mainstream, but then again a lot of today's more popular products (I'm talking like Beats popular here) are designed in such a way as to be easily driven by most sources and/or provide their own amplification, which sort of defeats the point of having headphone amplifiers built in to everything, and of course the audio geeks have whatever solution they've come up with, which has gone largely external these days, and in some cases is designed around cans that have more exotic requirements (e.g. orthos).
As far as the receiver and bass management, generally speaking (and I'll say I can't really speak to ultra-modern receivers (e.g. the newest Atmos-era stuff) because I don't own one and haven't played around with one) they offer the ability to either output the LFE track to the mains, to a sub output, or to both. But this is a different input scenario than on the PC, because you're talking about 5.1 from DVD or Laserdisc or Blu-ray or whatever, which is mixed with its full-range channels plus LFE, and then the decoder/processor can do bass management to enable small satellites to be blended into the subwoofer that you originally have to support the LFE channel (which was there for sound effects and stuff). Kind of a "two birds one stone" solution. Not saying its right or wrong. PC speakers, by contrast, more or less assumed that a fixed crossover had to exist because the whole "multimedia speaker" genre is designed around small speakers that can fit at a desk, and the woofer-in-a-box was there to give you more full-range sound from the overall system's response. Its basically borne out of necessity. On the PC side, the most typical convention is the c/sub output as the additional jack beyond 4.0, which creates endless problems once people started ditching their canned multimedia solutions and going with active monitors or some other rigidly 2.0 system but decided "I still want a lot of bass" and try to integrate a subwoofer to the mix, only to find there's no bass management capacity on their soundcard or speaker system.
