[leeperry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif What models from RME and Lynx do you recommend?

I dunno, it's way too high end for me to look at it...then I'd be badly tempted to grab one

I know professionals praise these 2 brands because their clocks are so damn accurate and stable, and the jitter inexistant so to speak.

apparently all the commercial blabla on their site is not b/s : LynxTWO

I don't think I actually need all that, and the ROI on these cards is rather thin compared to the 0404USB for instance for a simple stereo output...but I have to admit that the idea of getting bit-perfect Reclock sounds most delightful, too bad the entry ticket is almost a 4 digits figure

 

[Dr. Strangelove]

The spiel seems to be that a computer uses a relatively low grade switching PSU... which if used for any sort of audio related purpose (even indirectly), will cause ears to bleed and worlds to explode.

 

[leeperry]

another added value of the Lynx cards if that they can capture DSD losslessly, so you can actually copy SACD's losslessly and convert to PCM....and lemme tell you that some bad ass 5.1 SACD like Depeche Mode's(Violator anyone?) carry the best SQ I've ever heard...even DVD-A can't compete

 

[royalcrown]

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif So now we have come to the conclusion that a class A output section on a source its less necessary than having one on an amp and that a class B output can sound as good? Damn you guys are talking right out of your asses. Hey, I invented a time machine, you wanna know how it works? Man your buds must be full of red hairs!

For someone who always talks about experience and using your ears, you sure seem to be pushing an argument that doesn't rely at all on the ears. If the card sounds good, why does it matter whether it's class A or not? For the record, I never talked about class B at all, and that's because there's more than just class A and class B, there's also class A/B, and a lot of components run class A/B because it sounds just fine - and there are actual people who prefer class A/B designs to another, different, class A design. The same applies to discrete output stages - some discrete output stages suck, and some opamp output stages are amazing. The reverse applies as well.

What I really want to know is: why don't you put pretense aside and listen to the soundcards before passing judgment that they "must" somehow be bad because they're not class A/fully discrete/etc? If a component sounds good, who cares how it's made or what it's composed of? What do you have against just listening to a component without worrying about how it's designed? At the end of the day, all you should be worried about (and what all of us should be worried about) is how a given component performs, rather than bickering about things that may or may not actually matter.

As for the stuff you decided to bold for some reason:

"Class A and discrete output stages don't necessarily mean a higher-quality output. There are plenty of opamp outputs that beat discrete outputs, and vice-versa. "

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f7/rol...3/#post3850863

and for Class A:

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f5/rev...7/#post3746343

The OM is class A/B and IIRC the dynalo is class A. Furthermore, he said it comes very close to a maxed PPA, which is discrete.

"Class A is infinitely more important in amplifiers"

I stand by this, and you haven't said anything that would prove it wrong.

"Besides, running a DAC in class A isn't limited by the fact that a card is PCI"

I also stand by this. There's nothing special about PCI that would stop a sound card from being run in class A.

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif Im just having a hard time figuring out why no one, after a point, (I will let you decide where that point is) is not using an internal sound card for a source. The things you say are not paralleled by people in the real world and it's not like there are even a few exceptions. Am I to think that 99.99999999 percent of the members on this website are setting fire to money

For one, you're using a sliding scale fallacy - even if I pointed out a bunch of counterexamples, you would just claim that they haven't passed that "point" yet. Plus, you're talking about a price point. If we're talking about quality points, there are plenty of cases where people use sound cards for reference systems. At price points maybe not, but that kind of a comparison is pointless - of course after a certain price point nobody uses sound cards because with only a few exceptions sound cards aren't that expensive in the first place. Let's also not forget the fact that a lot of people on this forum use CD players, and at that point internal soundcards aren't ever going to be used because they don't serve a purpose for people using CDs as the playback media.

 

[Dr. Strangelove]

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeperry /img/forum/go_quote.gif so you can actually copy SACD's losslessly and convert to PCM....and lemme tell you that some bad ass 5.1 SACD like Depeche Mode's(Violator anyone?) carry the best SQ I've ever heard...even DVD-A can't compete

DVD-A uses PCM...

So your effectively converting SACD's format to LPCM.

 

[leeperry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove /img/forum/go_quote.gif DVD-A uses PCM... So your effectively converting SACD's format to LPCM.

actually, I have no explanation as to why the same album in SACD or 24/96 5.1 DVD-A sound different...the SACD sounds clearer and just so much better

apparently DSD is a completely different animal

 

[Dr. Strangelove]

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeperry /img/forum/go_quote.gif apparently DSD is a completely different animal

If the difference is because of DSD then it should be eliminated once you convert it to LPCM.

 

[obobskivich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif Im not ignoring you, I just didn't see a model that didn't have lots of useless features and I was thinking I was missing something. I just wanted to look at how they are made.

yeah, I honestly don't know what Lynx's deal with their soundcards is, most of them have been around for an AGE (5-10 years or longer), and they've seemingly moved to external solutions in the last few years (mostly due to input/output space constraints (if you want 24 inputs, its hard to do on an internal card))


Quote:

Originally Posted by leeperry /img/forum/go_quote.gif apparently DSD is a completely different animal

 

[anetode]

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif So they do make sound cards with a class A discrete output section?

One could be made if there were a market for such a thing. Remember, videocards consume & dissipate hundreds of watts, often hogging a large portion of the motherboard area as well. There's no reason that you can't create, say, a high quality tube amp to power headphones that can be made to fit a pcie slot & powered by a generic PSU. Heck, lend me a ten g R&D fund and I'll make you one

If you consider the market fairly, soundcards give you more bang for the buck than most products from traditional hi fi brands.

Edit - oh, and another gem

Quote:

Am I to think that 99.99999999 percent of the members on this website are setting fire to money?

Yes, but they claim to receive "piece of mind" or "audio nirvana" in return. Ask yourself how much you've spent on cables alone.

 

[olblueyez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by anetode /img/forum/go_quote.gif One could be made if there were a market for such a thing. Remember, videocards consume & dissipate hundreds of watts, often hogging a large portion of the motherboard area as well. There's no reason that you can't create, say, a high quality tube amp to power headphones that can be made to fit a pcie slot & powered by a generic PSU. Heck, lend me a ten g R&D fund and I'll make you one If you consider the market fairly, soundcards give you more bang for the buck than most products from traditional hi fi brands.

This is all fine and dandy but reality is they don't exist and if sound quality is the sole purpose of this item????????

 

[anetode]

I suspect that with the recent spate of hi-fi-themed audio cards like ASUS' Xonar Essence that companies are beginning to exploit the heretofore unrecognized demand for such products. Give it a few years of advances in mod culture/phase change cooling/silicon lithography and I think things will change for the better. It's funny, in retrospect, that fifteen years ago customers were laying out a hundred dollars just to get a 16 bit 2 ch audio card.

 

[Jewmeister]

The sound from the headphone jack on my IBM T61p thinkpad is just awful and cuts in and out when the jack turns, any suggestions, is this a faulty product?

 

[olblueyez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jewmeister /img/forum/go_quote.gif The sound from the headphone jack on my IBM T61p thinkpad is just awful and cuts in and out when the jack turns, any suggestions, is this a faulty product?

If your sure its not your headphones then I would have to say yes, it sounds like your HP jack on the IBM is shot.

 

[Shike]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jewmeister /img/forum/go_quote.gif The sound from the headphone jack on my IBM T61p thinkpad is just awful and cuts in and out when the jack turns, any suggestions, is this a faulty product?

Your best solution is probably an external DAC. There are internal solutions, but none of relevant quality like there is for desktop machines. A portable amp/dac combo would probably be up your alley . . .

I try to avoid my laptop headphone out if at all possible. It wasn't even grounded right and required me to do loops of electrical tape inside. Not a fun fix, and I'm pretty sure I won't be buying another Dell Vostro anytime soon for it.


As for desktops there's plenty of quality sound cards available. The only thing I worry about is companies that don't stick to PCI standards . . . Asus used to have issues with X-Fi cards as they didn't stick to standards. People were treated to pops, crackles, and other terrors due to it. As long as you get a fair quality board and a audio centric card though it should be okay. For the record I use an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude so you can burn me at the stake for saying this.

 

[obobskivich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by olblueyez /img/forum/go_quote.gif This is all fine and dandy but reality is they don't exist and if sound quality is the sole purpose of this item????????

sound quality isn't the purpose of soundcards

sound cards are "left overs" from the 1990's (the days when onboard audio didn't exist), most companies died or packed up shop (Aureal died, VIA hasn't really done much with discrete chips recently, C-Media downsized, Yamaha went home, Cirrus packed it in, etc), excepting Creative Labs, who re-invented itself with "surround sound gaming enhancement", using the DSP to "enhance" gaming and multimedia features (audio capture, surround decoding, h/w offload, etc), and kept themselves afloat based on that (and expanding quite quickly and virulently into other markets (such as mp3 players, professional graphics, input devices, and some other less successful ventures))

head-fi as a culture is generally quite naive in its assumptions that a product is designed as "cost no object pure performance" (and quite bluntly, this is all based on subjective populist opinion backed by psuedo-scientific claims and a lot of marketing fluff that consumers just love to lap up)

soundcards fit into this cycle, X-Fi was never marketed to audiophiles, neither was Audigy 2 ZS, Audigy 2, Audigy, or SB Live, they were marketed to PC enthusiasts, gamers, early adopting HTPC users, and so on

Xonar is the same way, its target markets are PC enthusiasts, gamers, HTPC users, and so on

ultimately, the biggest issue is that people have no idea what they're actually buying, what they actually want, or what they're actually reading (how many people really know what 24-bit audio means?), and when you add the populist opinion that soundcards are "evil" because they aren't designed like a $15k CD player, it spreads pretty quick (because its always fun to feel "enlightened" about some subject that counters all public opinion and lets you feel "unique", I have no idea what this effect is called, but at some point I'll probably have taken enough psychology classes and read enough books to know its proper name)

and yes, the PC filter is out at the shop until Monday

but this isn't actually meant as a flame towards anyone

oh, and shike, if you're going to the stake over witchcraft in using an X-Fi, I'll join you, because I couldn't be happier with my Prelude (or Audigy 2 ZS, just can't seem to find a use for the damned thing right now (they won't play nice together

))