Which budget sound card works best for 5.1 audio?

[HereIsNoWhy]

For the sub $50 sound card range, what works the best for 5.1 music and video playback? Is the Chaintech AV-710 still the best for this, or would something like the Turtle Beach Riviera, Catalina, or Santa Cruz be better? What about the Creative Soundblaster Live! 24 bit or the Aopen Cobra?

 

[sgrossklass]

AV-710 is less good for multichannel output, since then the VT1616 comes into play (the Wolfson DAC only covers two channels). Of the current Turtle Beach cards (the "Santa" is an older model, CS4630 with CS4297 and CS4294 codecs), one is equipped with a cheapo CMedia CMI8738 chip (meh), the other is similar to the AV-710 except for having a digital input (it's apparently identical to the Mad Dog Entertainer 7.1 card). There's more than one AOpen Cobra card; the AW-850 appears to be CMedia based. The only card to have good DACs on *all* channels is the Live! 24-Bit with its CS4382. Which is not to say that it would necessarily beat the AV-710 in subjective testing, the output stage isn't too great either after all. It would probably be best to try both and decide.

 

[blomquist]

I had a Live!24bit (until it died due to heavy mods), and if you swap the opamps to some better it sounds not that bad, really!

 

[Tachikoma]

Btw, does the Live!24bit keep up with creative's "sound mangler" rep? Does it have a bypass mode to play music without resampling it to 48khz? Someone told me the audigy LS had something like that.

 

[HereIsNoWhy]

Yeah is the resampling ordeal the only reason why people look down on Soundblaster products? I don't really have a way to demo any of these and don't want to bother with the Soundblaster Live! or the Turtle Beach if it's the same as the AV-710 but costs more. Is the Chaintech's 5.1 mode still decent enough for casual listening or is this going to sound really bad?

 

[Tachikoma]

Honestly, even the alt-out didn't really impress me. I did try listening to the usual front out, and honestly... its no different than onboard. Try out the Hercules fortissismo IV, based on the DACs it uses, its a class above the av-710 and it looks decent for 5.1.

Creative had a class-action lawsuit (whatever that means) not too long ago for advertising "24-bit playback". Guess why all of us lurve creative soooo much.

 

[HereIsNoWhy]

Does anybody in the states sell teh fortissimo? I actually looked into that and didn't find any online retailers.

 

[sgrossklass]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tachikoma Btw, does the Live!24bit keep up with creative's "sound mangler" rep? Does it have a bypass mode to play music without resampling it to 48khz? Someone told me the audigy LS had something like that.

First off, multichannel material tends to be in 48 (or 96 kHz) to begin with, so that wouldn't be an issue. Of course you still need good software resampling for 44.1 kHz (CD) material, with only a 24.576 xtal you can't get 44.1 and multiples by simple clock division and the resampling done by the driver (remember, CA0106, no DSP here) is optimized for game performance. I think the card does support 44.1 kHz on its digital input, must be some trick involved there.
BTW I did compare the Live! 24-Bit to an older Terratec DMX XFire 1024 (CS4624/CS4294), and while the Terratec had a more upfront presentation, the Live! 24-Bit matched my Aureon more closely in tonal balance. Neither of the two had a particularly wide soundstage, so they're "only sound cards". The WDM driver of the Live! 24-Bit is weird, giving pretty high CPU load (close to 20% on an 800EB). Not so with MME or DSound, where CPU usage still was higher than with the XFire but much more moderate (~5%).

 

[sgrossklass]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tachikoma Honestly, even the alt-out didn't really impress me. I did try listening to the usual front out, and honestly... its no different than onboard. Try out the Hercules fortissismo IV, based on the DACs it uses, its a class above the av-710 and it looks decent for 5.1.

I don't think the Fortissimo is available in the states. (In exchange, we can't buy AV-710s over here.) As for the AV-710, did you disable the onboard headphone amp before doing critical listening to the front out? (If that's an ordinary power amp chip this would largely determine overall performance, even if the VT1616 isn't that great to begin with. That obviously PLL-induced noise doesn't look too good.) As for the alt out, well, it's not supposed to be world-class absolutely speaking, just very good for a $25 card. (It's amazing enough that the DAC can drive the output decently, never having been designed for use without nearby additional amplifying stages.)

Quote:

Creative had a class-action lawsuit (whatever that means) not too long ago for advertising "24-bit playback". Guess why all of us lurve creative soooo much.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That lawsuit referred to 24/96 playback on the first Audigy which in fact could only output 24/96 on the digital out while the analog outs reached 16 bits and 48 kHz only since the DSP couldn't be bypassed. Creative cards (the old EMU10Kx stuff) aren't liked a whole lot here because of crappy resampling and output stages.