Looking for a modern, reasonably priced sound card - Hardware & Software

Long story short, I had a dedicated $20 Creative sound card I bought to solve a problem with Punkbuster/Realtek conflicts years ago, recently it died in the middle of a game, and while I'm no audiophile, after immediately switching to the integrated one I can totally hear how unbelievably bad it is. I thought about getting the same model again but its near-20 year old software was getting on my nerves lately, so I thought I might as well get something made in this millennium. Does anybody have any experience with decent sound cards here? Are Creative drivers still so bad? I'm looking for something up to about $120, that way I won't have to upgrade anytime soon, if ever. Would prefer an internal PCI one instead of a USB DAC as well, don't really have much space on my desk for it

I use a Xonar DSX. It does what I need it to, but you have to use third party/modded drivers for it to play nice.

You might want to go with a dedicated amp, alongside a soundcard. There's only so much an audio card can do, while a dedicated amp can clean up/rectify a lot of the sound, especially with headphones.

I'll look into it, but poor driver support was exactly the thing I was trying to avoid

Eh, for what it's worth the third party drivers are pretty much perfect.

I don't know much about sound cards but I've been looking into DACs and amps for myself and I had come across a combo that might fit your small desk space. Schiit's Fulla 2 is 100$ US and is fairly small. No clue what kind of cost you'd be looking at for international though. It's at least something to consider if it does fit.

i really dont recommend a fulla 2. i demo'd one at a store and it was significantly worse than my onboard audio. shoving an amp and a dac into a unit that small will never be good

the problem with your request is that all the sound cards with good drivers have bad hardware and all the sound cards with good hardware have bad audio. this is something i've personally had a lot of trouble with.

Also works well on Linux! (If you don't plug in the cursed front headphone jack and use the rear) It's mainly an optical out for me though

This thing won't blow your ears off - it's not even technically an amp - but it's noticeably better than any onboard audio I've encountered. I bought it to replace my motherboard's audio chip which was succumbing to signal leaking. https://smile.amazon.com/Signstek-Coaxial-Converter-Convert-Analogue/dp/B00FEDHHKE?sa-no-redirect=1 It's cheap as dirt and works. I pulled mine apart and it has the legitimate TI DAC chip in it that it claims to have. I'm not an audiophile but it drives my MDR-7506 headphones noticeably better than inbuilt audio hardware does. It doesn't require any drivers at all, since it just takes a PCM signal over USB (or optical Toslink if you're a pervert.)

i own this and it's pretty good. doesn't even need drivers because it's USB audio standard

Modern onboard audio is fine, you won't notice a difference until you're several hundred bucks into the wormhole.

nope Onboard audio is shit for driving any decent headphones with even a little more impedance than a pair of ipod earbuds

i have an external dac and amp that i use and prefer but this is wrong. both my phone and my desktop's onboard soundcard can drive my hd 800 s' just fine with volume to spare. music may not sound as dynamic but you wouldn't even know if you didn't have a direct comparison

maybe I've just been unlucky. I've noticed a clear difference between using my onboard audio and anything with some kind of opamp with my srh-440s.

I already have to set the volume 3x as high as I used to just to get the same volume level as before with only 50Ω headphones, I don't think my onboard would be able to drive the 300Ω HD800's at all. Maybe my motherboard is just garbage.

If anything it's the opposite. Even cheap dedicated sound cards are well isolated and have reasonable amplification power - both areas many boards are still lacking in. Onboard sound chips themselves are usually fine, it's the surrounding circuitry that's the problem. Particularly laptops can be surprisingly terrible. But since anything discrete is generally good enough, high-end ~audiophile~ gear doesn't really yield more improvements. Pro audio cards/"interfaces" just add more channels and higher bit depth / sample rate (which for recording/editing purposes is actually useful).

It's more like a Schiit thing than a size thing. Plenty of small units have good measured performance; nobody's measured the Fulla AFAIK but some of Schiit's pricier units don't do so well. @R E D L I N E , if you're still shopping around/living with the onboard, the cheapest dedicated I'd recommend would be something like a ($40) Fiio K1. It only outputs 1.2v (about as much as the better onboard solutions), but otherwise should be more or less transparent for most audio. If you want more juice its big brother the ($80) E10K is about as reliably and unremarkable as a Toyota Camry. I don't think I could recommend an internal solution in good conscience honestly. I've heard horror stories about some of the newer Asus units switching between amplification modes for no good reason (RIP ears), have personal horror stories about Creative's SBZ series drivers, and don't think you want to pay $180 for the newer Creative model.

No, the size is definitely a big factor. Plus the Fulla 2 is pretty much Schiit's worst product. Schiit products tend to be pretty good across the board - although rarely the absolute best for any given situation. Those are 44 Ohms, you absolutely don't need a dedicated amp with those. How old is your onboard audio, and are you using front panel or back panel?

It's a brand new board (well, 2017), and they sounded pretty flat no matter which ports I used. I also had problems with my modmic until I installed the DSX. As said, maybe bad luck.

Sounds stupid but I've been using a Behringer mixer as a 'sound card'. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-502-Xenyx-mixer/dp/B000J5UEGQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522280708&sr=8-2&keywords=behringer+mixer It actually sounds pretty good on headphones and goes nice and loud (at least for my basic pair of Amazon Headphones). Plus there's the benefit of running RCA or an amplified XLR microphone into your machine.

I use an Asus Xonar DGX Sound Card: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Express-Normalizer-Virtual-Speaker-Shifter/dp/B007RMMYFI And the drivers I use are UNi Xonar modded drivers, as they keep them updated with newer versions of windows and bug fixes and the like. It's an all round brilliant sound card and you can't go wrong for the price

I've got one of these but after 2 weeks it now lives on a shelf because there's so much interference (hissing/crackling) coming through, a common complaint with this model anyway. Would avoid.

That happened to my friend's too. He called them up and got a replacement but who knows if that one will go too. I took his old one and the mixer part seemed to work fine. That is until I got a loud pop and the compressor light stayed on with not even noise going through the output.

I too tried getting a replacement but their shitty website interface kept bugging out and I could never actually submit the claim. I've no idea on other products of theirs but I try to avoid Behringer in general now.