But if that was the case, you'd need a cpu with an gpu (who is going to put a ryzen apu in a topend mobo??)... so really scummy. How the hell is my $140 asrock have proper 7.1 analog and optical but not this pos lol
I looked at the more detailed specs, and here we have:
3 x audio jacks
2/4/5.1/7.1-channel
You can change the functionality of an audio jack using the audio software. To configure 7.1-channel audio, access the audio software for audio settings.
If using 2-pole aux jacks, those 3 back panel female connectors only provide 6 independent channels. If the case has a front panel connector, you can push that to 8 channels.
The only way you're squeezing 7.1 analog out of that is if you use the front panel as LR, use two of the three back panel ones as surround, and share center with the sub between the last remaining connector. But, that's assuming that two of those back connectors aren't for mic or line in.
Maybe you could squeeze digital output through those jacks, but then you'd need a compatible receiver. Either way, stupid design for such an expensive motherboard.
who is going to put a ryzen apu in a topend mobo??
Ok... assuming the audio inputs can be changed to outputs... you lose analog inputs which isn't great either.
I guess I missed where amd has released apus on normal skus on this gen. But still, I don't like being forced to buy a specific cpu just because the uber expensive mobo cheaped out on adding outputs...
That's disappointing, as one of the advantages of SPDIF is no ground loops between the PC and the receiver/amp. Maybe that's not really as much of a problem now, but it solved that for me years ago and I've used it ever since.
Then again, I don't have a surround setup, simple stereo is good enough.
compression with surround isn't really the issue. it's that the newer dolby/DTS stuff needs more bandwidth. imo, 2.1 is more than enough for 95% of pc users.
The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.
And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.
If you want good sound, buy an external usb DAC. It will be away from all electro magnetic interference and will be way better than any consumer stuff.
Lol how do you think they get to that front panel?
I mean sure go ahead and shield this and that (and still get em interference in the DAC card because it's hooked up to the friggin PCI express bus on the motherboard) instead of using a simple USB cable.
How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker
The c64 could do all sorts of music over the TV speakers, even voices. Who can forget Impossible Mission "Another visitor, stay a while, stay forever!"
Flexible enough that Access Software built a library called RealSound that could do 6-bit PCM audio over it. Which isn't great but is dramatically better than you'd expect. A bit over a dozen or so games used it.
I had one called Mean Streets that used it for things like voice. The game came with instructions for how to build a cable to connect your internal speaker to an RCA cable to run to a stereo or similar.
I still like Xonar cards, like the Xonar DG (though it isn't compatible with my new PC). I always liked their interface more than the competitors, and it puts out excellent volume on my Logitech headset that is otherwise way too quiet for me. Never been a big fan of the simulated 3D environments on any of these cards, though. The only game it ever sounded decent in was No Man's Sky, but even that still had a distant tinny sound to it.
I think most people just use external amplifiers these days, but I'm still using a third-party sound card.
What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
It also wasn’t worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker
All speakers are two pins. 🤔 They were crappy because they were most often little piezoelectric speakers, or otherwise very small where they couldn't play low frequency sounds well.
My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.
Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.
I used to use a sound card until it died. When I researched how to get good sound I found most people use a DAC/amp combo now. But onboard is usually good enough. It was a noticable upgrade but not sure if it was worth the money.
G5 is a USB card. And I'd argue that's the best approach, as sound signal being analog is highly susceptible to interference, and insides of a computer have a lot of that.
On board is easier and for any audio enthusiast, sounds like trash by comparison.
I have yet to meet an onboard audio solution that didn't give you garbage in the output. Whether it's coil whine, a low hiss or a 60hz him, there's always something.
Onboard, in my experience also distorts way earlier into the volume slider by comparison.
I always hear interference, especially from a mouse, in onboard audio.
I'm happy you haven't had this problem, but I consider that to be an outlier in the grand scheme of things.
I'd also be willing to bet you have the problem but just haven't noticed it. Which is fine. If the issue isn't one you have noticed, and you're fine with onboard, go ham. Have fun. That's not me though.
Take a look at your board. How many sources of interference do you see? Historically a lot of the board was analog. Now they are digital. Unless your board is a fire hazard that shouldn't happen. It just isn't how it works. If USB affects audio you machine is probably toast and fuses should of blown.
Considering how many systems I've heard this on, not just my own, and how long I've been able to hear it, no. Definitely not.
Some newer boards have gotten wise to the issue and generally shield or provide an exclusion area around audio carrying circuits. Not all of them do it.
Above and beyond that, the amps used are generally crap and distort at high volume levels, so no matter how good your headphones are, the audio always sounds like hot trash at high volume levels regardless of pretty much everything else.
My AG06 costs as much as a cheap motherboard. There's no doubt that the audio hardware, designed and produced by Yamaha, a well known name in audio equipment, had been built with better components than you'll find in your average onboard audio solution, and with more attention to detail about interference sources.
Considering the AG06 is on their low end of equipment, compared to some stuff out there, it's complete trash. There are audio interfaces and headphone amps that cost 5-10x what I paid for the AG06, and some that cost more. I promise you they sound better than my dinky little audio interface/mixer.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you're happy with your audio solution, cool. Use it. I'm not here to judge you for what you like. For those who hear the distortion and interference from onboard audio, they already know what I'm talking about and likely have their own audio setup which eliminates any trouble they might have with their onboard audio. As long as they're happy with theirs, cool, they should use it.
I'm happy with mine.
Please don't argue that the problem doesn't exist because your limited experience hasn't noticed it. That kind of subjective anecdotal evidence proves nothing beyond the fact that you don't have a problem with your setup.
That's cool. But don't tell me that it's not a problem just because you don't have that problem.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, [...] the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful
And the a Atari ST and Amiga 500 was released in the late 1980s.
You just unlocked a memory for me. One of my dad's friends had a super cool keyboard, I think it was a Casio. It had midi, and a bunch of built in instruments. Then he had another friend, who was a huge geek, who figured out how to extract the midi instruments from the keyboard, so we could use them to replace the cheaper sounding midi instruments in windows.
Obviously it didn't sound as good as the keyboard, because it still was dragged behind by inferior hardware on the PC. Not to mention the fact that some of the instruments just didn't play, and that Windows liked to crash and revert all instruments back to the default if it didn't like an instrument we tried to feed it, but I still remember it as something really badass.
Most of Creative's AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I'd call it realistic-sounding).
The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.
Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.
most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers
Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn't even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM
You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It's the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were "Soundblaster compatible".
Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.
The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.
BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.
Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.
(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).
Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.
(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).
And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one. And onboard audio at that time wasn’t great anyways.
You can still get discrete sound cards (both internal and USB), though they're more for audiophile stuff. With the PS5 touting big 3d audio improvements and HRTFs I half expected manufacturers to make a push to bring them back or at least feature sound features more prominantly in motherboards but I guess CPUs these days can just spare the cycles if you want fancy audio.
And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one
we are at this point in history, but for graphics cards :)
Not in the same way, as you aren’t using the integrated gpu at all if you get an external one. I guess if you’re talking about shared ram this makes sense though.
yea, IDK how it works as I've never had a computer back then, but the quoted reply makes it sound like getting a sound card would take load off of the CPU.
oh - my apologies, I forgot that on-board graphics have a dedicated chipset. Also, no idea whether on-board sound would have used CPU power back in the late days of soundcards, as the comment I responded to was claiming... might have been a sound chip for that, too..
I remember Battlefield 2 being a prime example for that. Not only did its performance improve once I added a discrete sound card, it also sounded much better.
I don't think that's accurate... Of course it's possible I'm misremembering something from 35+ years ago, but there's no performance benefit for 14 bits over 16- either way, it's a 2-byte fetch, you don't save anything by leaving off two bits. So I'd almost believe it was 8-bit rather than 16, but the difference in sound quality is huge, and the Amigas had a 16-bit data bus so 16-bit fetches took no more effort than 8-bit. The sample rate I'd be more likely to believe I had wrong, but again, there are technical reasons for the 44.1 kHz rate that have to do with recording digital audio to videotape, so I could see it being half that, but not some random number. But again, huge sound quality difference between 44.1 and 22.05.
All that said, I'm not too familiar with the 1000, I had the 500 which was basically the same machine as the 2000 but in a more compact case. My uncle had a 1000, but he used it professionally so he wouldn't let me near it :D
Most BIOSes can show them on screen and most motherboards have LEDs to indicate WTF is going on before the screen becomes active. Also, boot up failures are extremely rare compared to 1990-s.
Many mainboards have moved to a small piezoelectric speaker, not dissimilar to the buzzer on an old style of digital watch (think Timex), rather than a speaker pinout for the system.
It's soldered right to the mainboard. It's different than the crap cone style system speaker.
The cone style usually was bundled with the case and was usually mismatched lowest bidder garbage.
I'm pretty sure that even very modern mainboards have a piezo style "speaker" on them, though many might forego this in favor of lights or something.
Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.
