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    Sound Card question..

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by sinistertwo, Jun 2, 2007.

  1. sinistertwo

    sinistertwo Notebook Enthusiast

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    Do sound cards improve the quality of sound? I'm not sure what the purpose of sound cards are anymore..for ex..I got a desktop and SLI'd it..leaving no room for a sound card. The sound coming from my speakers sounds great. But I use 2 5 foot tower speakers with an equalizer for my desktop so that could be it.

    Does a sound card improve the quality of sound from a laptop?
     
    sinistertwo, Jun 2, 2007
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  2. rahkunn

    rahkunn Notebook Consultant

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    One of the advantages of getting a better sound card is if you do any sort of music production, and have different equipments such as electronic keyboard hooked up to your computer. Not only is it beneficial in that you can actually connect all those devices to begin with (as opposed to only having minimal ports on integrated or budget sound cards) the faster chips on better cards allow for almost near-perfect synchronization between the devices and the computer (commonly known as 'latency').

    There might be a slight advantage in gaming as well, since better cards can handle more sounds simultaneously and accurately (no skipping, no stuttering, no distortion) than the lower priced counterparts.

    As for simply playing mp3 files and such, I do not believe having a better card would make any difference.
     
    rahkunn, Jun 2, 2007
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  3. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    if you dont have a soundcard, your cpu is in charge.

    in xp gaming, this means that adding a soundcard improves your frames per second by some 10%, pretty consistently, and also can give you special "spatial" sound effects, if that makes sense.

    but onboard sound these days "can" be really high quality for simple music output. with quality equipment, people can't tell the difference between 128 and 256kbps aac's anyway...

    oh yeah, and in vista, the sound is handled differently- if you are a vista gamer everything is taken care of by the OS and you really don't want a sound card.
     
    masterchef341, Jun 2, 2007
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  4. sinistertwo

    sinistertwo Notebook Enthusiast

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    10-4..yeah..the laptop I will be getting will have Vista. So sound cards are completely obsolete with Vista unless you need to do sound mixing or what the user above you posted? And no I cant tell the difference between 128 and 256kbps =\
     
    sinistertwo, Jun 2, 2007
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