[mythtv-users] "Do you really need a discrete audio card ?"

[Frans Grotepass]

On Tuesday 23 November 2010 00:12:23 Christopher X. Candreva wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Andrew Close wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Christopher X. Candreva
> > 
> > <chris at westnet.com> wrote:
> > > Tech Report has release an interesting review, comparing the Asus Xonar
> > > cards to the common built-in Realtek chips, with the low-end ($29)
> > > Xonar comming out as a worthwhile upgrade.
> > > 
> > > Aside from the article being interesting, it made me wondering if
> > > switching audio cards would help with the "WriteAudio: buffer
> > > underrun" problems I have with untranscoded content, which hasn't gone
> > > away with 0.24
> > 
> > do you have a link?  did they mention anything regarding pass-through
> 
> Whoops
> 
> http://techreport.com/articles.x/19997
> 

One of my work PCs was a Dell with the sound chip next to the SATA chips. This 
was a useless combination. The moment you did any disk access, the speakers 
would light up with a distinct buzz. Disasterous. Design of the on board sound 
is thus very important. 

The mother board used for my MythTV has onboard 7.1 sound, HDMI and SPDIF. The 
manufacturer of the boad claim that they went to quite some trouble to keep 
the sound card "clean" in terms of electrical emmissions and suceptability. 
The analog part of the sound card did sound quite good, but since then, I 
switched to SPDIF and now I run on the HDMI. It has the advantage that the 
switch of the sound input is handled on one point, so selecting the AV channel 
is handled with one switch instead of two. 

The just of my post? most onboard analogue sound is rubbish, but there are 
cases where the MB manufacturer paid extra attention. Even so, with the trends 
in audio to digital, I think that my future will have less and less chance of 
using a discrete card.

Frans