Onboard ALC888 or PCI Santa Cruz (Turtle Beach)?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul
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Paul

SHRED said:
I am building a new system.
My old one has a PCI sound card:
Santa Cruz
http://www.guru3d.com/review/santacruz/

Question:

Is the onboard Realtek ALC888 better?
Is the technology superior, sound quality wise, for the onboard audio
these days?

I use 2 speakers and headphones only.
Click to expand...

Onboard sound may have inferior background noise levels, and
that can be important when recording content with high dynamic
range (classical music with quiet passages).

Both cards will use different drivers, so cannot be
compared from that perspective. In terms of feature
set, a lot of the features seen on an audio device, are
created via DSP (digital signal processing), and that
is done with the processor. It could be, that the Reaktek
uses a bit more processor, to give a richer feature set.
(For example, you may see a graphic equalizer on the Reaktek
control panel, but it is implemented in software. Typically,
there isn't dedicated hardware to do that. The Nforce2 MCP-T
was the only one I can think of, with significant resources
for sound, using onboard audio.)

The best way to determine what to do, is to test both
solutions.

For example, on my system, it took me a couple months, to decide
to give up on my onboard audio. I found, in a particular game,
that the EAX implementation (again, software sound effects), was
flawed, and the sound was muddy in places. Also, the onboard
audio and its driver, added reverberation to everything (echo),
which can screw up music playback.

The best person to judge, is your own ears. It won't take long
to uninstall the ALC888, disable it in the BIOS, and plug in
your old PCI card. One thing you might want to check for, is
whether your PCI card, has drivers available for whatever
OS you're using on the new machine.

Paul
 
Paul said:
Onboard sound may have inferior background noise levels, and
that can be important when recording content with high dynamic
range (classical music with quiet passages).

Both cards will use different drivers, so cannot be
compared from that perspective. In terms of feature
set, a lot of the features seen on an audio device, are
created via DSP (digital signal processing), and that
is done with the processor. It could be, that the Reaktek
uses a bit more processor, to give a richer feature set.
(For example, you may see a graphic equalizer on the Reaktek
control panel, but it is implemented in software. Typically,
there isn't dedicated hardware to do that. The Nforce2 MCP-T
was the only one I can think of, with significant resources
for sound, using onboard audio.)

The best way to determine what to do, is to test both
solutions.

For example, on my system, it took me a couple months, to decide
to give up on my onboard audio. I found, in a particular game,
that the EAX implementation (again, software sound effects), was
flawed, and the sound was muddy in places. Also, the onboard
audio and its driver, added reverberation to everything (echo),
which can screw up music playback.

The best person to judge, is your own ears. It won't take long
to uninstall the ALC888, disable it in the BIOS, and plug in
your old PCI card. One thing you might want to check for, is
whether your PCI card, has drivers available for whatever
OS you're using on the new machine.

Paul
Click to expand...

Yes drivers are available still.
It will be a sound test due to the fact that my new system will have
plenty of resources with 2g ram and a q6600 CPU.

Sound advice Paul (pun intended).
Thanks
 
I can tell you from first-hand experience the Santa Cruz has
notably better sound quality (better SNR, etc) than the onboard
Realtek. However the ALC888 has some bells and whistles
(A3D, Dolby Digital Live etc) that the Santa Cruz doesn't.

Also, Turtle Beach (as usual) washed their hands of any driver
support past the OS that was current when it was released. The
last released driver from TB was in 2003. As for Vista:

"This product has been discontinued, it is no longer in production,
and there is no more development for it. There is no Windows
Vista Support or Drivers for this product."
ftp://ftp.turtlebeach.com/pub/tbs/santacru/vista_dr.txt
 
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