The Annual Sound Card Thread!

[jeff b]

Yes, boys and girls, it's time for that subject to be thrashed about again! It's been a year since the last really in depth thread here concerning who's using what and why.

I'm only bringing it up because I've had my trusty old soundblaster ISA card give up the ghost completely in its ninth and final life.

I should think that there ought to be some PCI stuff around now that has been tried and true, and perhaps the old leanings toward ISA sound cards inside of video editing boxes has shifted into the history books? Maybe?

Well, let's find out...

Please post your most heartfelt responses and inflammatory remarks to same into our annual sound card shoot-out thread!

Jeff B

[Elie]

Ahh the good ol' soundcard thread, thanks Jeff

Well when it comes to PCI cards, I've had experience with the Turtle Beach Montego II and the Soundblaster Live X-Gamer.
The Montego II Digital outperformed the Live in quality and performance, it spoiled me!
The Spdif out was so quiet and the dynamic range was well dynamic
The Montego II is based on the Aureal chipset which they are now bankrupt, so there goes future driver developement.
I also had problems when I tried to output AC3 through Spdif to my receiver when playing DVD's.
All these reasons made me buy a Live Xgamer 5.1.

Now the Live worked instantly, I immediately tested a few DVD's and both Dolby 5.1 and DTS was able to pass through to the receiver with great quality.
HOWEVER, this card is noisy as hell!!! a lot of hisssssssssssssssssssssss and distorted highs and lows.
I'm an audio phile my self, and noticed a difference immediatly between the clearity of the Montego II digital and the live.

Well soon after I bought the Live, two new soundcards were announced (Don't you hate it when it happens?).
The first sound card is by Phillips called the Acoustic Edge 5.1-Channel PCI

http://www.philipsusa.com/

And the second is the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

http://www.voyetra-turtle-beach.com/...ucts/santacru/

Now a few I know bought the Acoustic Edge 5.1 and swear by it's audio quality and compatibility with all OS's including Win2K.

A few also have commented on the Santa Cruz and it's audio quality even beating the MonegoII, it comes with a Cirrus Logic high quality chipset and it's for pro editing etc.

Both soundcards above are in the $99 US range and are very close in terms of feature sets and quality.

Now let's just say.. amungst all the soundcards I have mentioned, to date the Live has the least CPU utilization of them all, now that's according to a guy that has dedicatd his web site to testing soundcards, I forgot the URL but will let you know what it is soon.

Just another soundcard that I forgot to mention is the Yamaha 192XG -Digital, if midi is your thing, this is the card to get.

Cheers and good luck
Regards,
Elie

[Dr Mordrid]

As about everyone knows here I'm pretty much anti-PCI (at least most of 'em), but that Santa Cruz card is sure tempting. Now...if only it doesn't hawg the PCI bus like the SBUndead does.

We'll see.....

Dr. Mordrid

[KRSESQ]

FWIW:

I purchased my trusty old Media Vision Proaudio 16 ISA sound card way back in '93 and this is the third system it's been moved into and it works great. Aside from the signal/noise ratio not being terrific (-75 db), and the inevitable audio sync drift in Prem 4.2 preview (not blaming that on the card!), I've never had reason to regret buying it.

Bad news: Media Vision was absorbed by Turtle Beach years ago, so driver support is nil.
Good news: Win 98 drivers are more than sufficient to the task.

Unless someone offers a really good recommendation or they simply stop making the things, I'll probably stick with ISA.

Kevin

[jeff b]

The turtle beach Santa Cruz looks like an interesting piece, but I'm still wary of the PCI "bus hog" dilemma that Doc has always warned about.

The one thing that has always been disappointing with the trusty old SB ISA, however, was the noise on the output. I'm a heaphones lover, and the Santa Cruz touts being able to easily drive headphones with some very impressive S/N, so that really sucked me in!

Having fantastic and full-featured gaming and DVD audio output on my computer really isn't an item for me, though. I just want up to 48kHz sample rate in and out with low noise, that's all. I don't run speakers on the computer, because I'm also a ham radio operator, and rf gets into the computer/speaker-wire/speaker chain too easily. I operate high power AM on low frequencies, so it's pretty much of a fait accompli: no way to run any audio out of the computer into the air... headphones are the only way for me to go.

I had started getting into the "multi-track on the computer" route with Cakewalk, etc., but finally decided to offload all my audio to separate systems: Boss BR-8, rack mount preamp/compression/limiting, rack mount eq's, rack mount effects, etc., all of which is designed with good rf filtering.

It's pretty much a given that just about any sound card will capture 44.1kHz sample rate without adding any noise (duh!), but monitoring the output on headphones is something that the Santa Cruz might be worth the hundred bucks just for that.

...unless, of course, somebody has any other suggestions for PCI cards that aren't bus hogs, and can drive a set of Sony 7506 headphones without sounding like a 1960's transistor radio.

Jeff B

[Sciascia]

We use Digigram audio cards (can't remember the model number off the top of my head) for our radio automation system (BE VaultXPRESS systems). The specs were outstanding, though I believe they are rather pricey and they may suck up some considerable bandwidth (compared to an ISA). If you are looking for multiple input and output, high SN ratio, and just a good solid pro level card, I would probably go with this. You might want to do some research, since these are audio only systems that we use them on.

[Fred H]

Hi,
my old SoundBlaster 16 ISA is a survivor of 2 system upgrades and I hope that it don't will "give up the ghost" before I'll upgrade to a new Athlon system. This old fellow works well in MSP6 and analogue video/sound, but its mic gain is not the best one anymore.
However, my trusty ISA card is the reason why I am looking for an ABIT KT133A board instead the ASUS A7V, when I'll upgrade my main system in the near future.
I duno if it's the right way to go, but it is my argu.

Fred H

[This_Idiot]

I used an old AWE32 for years, until I reached the situation that I needed the same card in 2 machines. At this point, ISA cards (of reasonable price and quality) were about as common as hens teeth. Taking on board all the negative commentary on the SBLive (which was pretty fresh out) with regard to vidcap, I invested in a Yamaha XG-192 PCI which has worked flawlessly in all the vidcap machines that I have built so far. Except the latest, which hasn't yet earned the honour of hosting the XG. However, THAT beastie is an Athlon Tbird800 on an Asus A7V mobo - which doesn't have any ISA slots. So all you ISA dinosaurs out there should be looking seriously at non-ISA replacements, since supportive motherboards are not going to be around for long....

[Elie]

I agree with you Chris, we should all switch to PCI audio cards, but here's a situation why some of us can't...

I have two machines, one is based on the Asus CUSL2 (no ISA) which is what my previous post was all about, The Marvel G400 now works flawlessly and I have no problems with the Live.

My second machine is based on the Asus P2B-D with only 4 PCI slots, now this board based on the BX chipset is considered to be one of the most stable boards out there, it's my editing machine and all PCI slots are occupied with..

1-RT2000
2-Second video card (Mystique 220)
3-Promise Fasttrak 66
4-Adaptec 2940UW scsi card.

So you can see that all I have left in this case are two ISA slots, one for the Ethernet card and the other for... you got it, the soundcard.
Now what I could do, is take out the Mystique 220 and replace it with a PCI card, but the problem here is, as Doc mentioned, most of them are PCI hawgs and will give me problems when capturing or editing.

When a major successor to the BX chipset comes out to the market, I'll buy a PCI soundcard to accommodate.

Cheers,
Elie

[jeff b]

There was a computer show locally this past weekend, and I picked up an SBLive for peanuts. I also found an older SB16 for nine bucks!

I've been poking around with different installs of Windows ME, and these cards on a PIII-1000 plugged into a gigabyte Mobo with one of the dreaded Via chipsets, along with the SIIG 1394 card, and I can tell you: the via chipset is quite crappy. This, of course, has been said before here, and I remembered that when I said, "Oh Alright, I'll take it" when offered one for nothing.

Hey! Why not spend some time investigating a known piece of crap, eh? But, I can get it to work okay with MSP6 timeline playback, as long as I shut off the Task Scheduler, check off "support non-compliant" in the IEEE-1394 driver, and don't have my temp files for the preview on the same drive as the source files. Works equally well with PCI modem / ISA SB16, or ISA modem / SBLive PCI. I haven't tried it with both PCI modem and PCI SB, though.

So, one of the worst of all possible worlds: Via chipset, SBLive! Value PCI sound card, all on Windows ME... who could have imagined tackling such a nightmare, eh?

Meanwhile, my p2b-f PIII-500 waits for a new power supply; sitting there forlorn and sad in the corner. I had been running seven hard drives off that 250 watt p/s for about a year, and it finally said, "the heck with YOU!"

I picked up two 40gig 7200rpm WD's at the show for $130 (usd) each, and benchmarked them on Sandra: these two on the FastTrack will easily capture and playback full uncompressed NTSC, but I can't imagine THAT on the via chipset! So I'll have to figure out which way I want to go for the real A/V system, once I'm through messing around here. I'm seriously considering putting the Mystique220/RR-S back into service, just for the uncompressed fun I could have.

Jeff B

[Patrick]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">I'm seriously considering putting the Mystique220/RR-S back into service, just for the uncompressed fun I could have.</font>

Jeff, I don't want to go off on an entirely different tangent here (not that this hasn't happened in the past ), but IS there some kind of a "hack" to allow the RR-S to capture uncompressed YUY2 video? Here's an earlier discussion about this topic- http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/005314.html
Or are you talking about RGB capture?

[jeff b]

Hey Patrick!

Well, I guess that would be RGB uncompressed video that I'm talking about. I can't do blue/green screen with DV because of the colorspace, so that's the one thing that really is a drawback, in my opinion. But live cam greenscreen would certainly be ducky if I had the capability to record it.

That's really all I was thinking about with the RR.

Jeff B

[Patrick]

Gosh darn it !!!

[jeff b]

I did find, if anyone's interested, that the SB Live! Value can drive my headphones from the line out plug with no discernable noise. I tried two different installs on this: one using only the drivers off the install disk when asked by Windows ME from the driver update, and the other using the install disk to install all the stuff it had. Since there are so many combinations of tweaking, I couldn't try too many of them before I got completely bored, but it really didn't seem to make any difference to the MSP6 timeline preview playback for DV via IEEE-1394.

What did make a difference were the following: Checking off "support non compliant devices" in the settings for the 1394 device in control panel - system - devices. Disabling the task scheduler. Using Sandra to find out what things are running all the time (when doing ctrl-alt-del) and seeing what affect they have when turned off. There were little reminder programs that showed up for registering software that I registered long ago, but were now being newly installed, for instance, that wreaked havoc. Windows ME has more of this kind of junk, too, of course.

My advice is don't get a board with a Via chipset, but if you're stuck with one, IEEE-1394 DV can be made to work with MSP6 if you persevere. I haven't seen any difference in performance between Win98SE and WinME using this board, and the little problems appear to be equal and the same between the two operating systems on the Via chipset board. The only thing that I found nice about WinME was that it boots faster.

Jeff B

[Brian Ellis]

I guess you all know my experience by now: if not, here goes.

The quality of a sound card depends more on factors outside the sound card that the card itself, IMO. A little research shows that there are a number of factors, including radiation from the mother board or the power supply unit being picked up by some part of the sound board, ground loops inducing noise, poor screening of the leads, even ferrite suppressors in a strong noise magnetic field, common mode errors, etc.

I had several computers with Asus boards (incl. Pentium Pro and Pentium II/III types) which simply were hopeless with either SB16 ISA or SB Live! boards and certainly unusable for NLE. I have 2 other computers which both works fine for NLE with the G-200 AND SB Live! with absolutely no problem. One of them is the identical computer to the last Asus P2B I bought, with just the Asus m/b changed for another make, with all the difference between ebony and ivory.

I therefore repeat my basic findings: if you have an apparent compatibility problem between a Marvel and a Live! (or any other PCI card) and you have no conflicts, then look farther than just the sound card: it is more fundamental than that.

I'm as categorical about that, from experience, as Doc is categorical about the fault lying within the sound card (and I don't think he's right).

------------------
Brian (the terrible)