Why Sound Blasters are crap...

I don't really disagree with the premise but there is something fishy about that article.

You don't need a pile of test equipment or golden ears, as the hi-fi purists call them, to determine the quality of your audio. That just got a whole lot easier, thanks to the efforts of RightMark Gathering, an open-source group led by a couple of Russian programmers. They've created and continually enhanced the RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA), which lets you test your sound card with nothing more than a male-to-male mini stereo cable. You use this cable as a loopback device from your sound card's outputs to its inputs. RMAA then tests the sound card's frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, harmonic distortion, and intermodulation distortion, and presents the results numerically and graphically. RMAA is freeware, yet it replaces $1,000-plus lab equipment that gives you the same conclusions.
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That test would be completely colored by the input ADC and wouldn't really give any useful info about a card's playback fidelity.
 
TexRoadkill said:
I don't really disagree with the premise but there is something fishy about that article.



That test would be completely colored by the input ADC and wouldn't really give any useful info about a card's playback fidelity.
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I think maybe that is the point of the software, to test your card input ADC... but then if that is the case, the test is completely colored by the cards output ADC (in the case of some cards, they may have a higher input ADC than output or vice-versa)...

really either way you look at it (wanting to test your input or wanting to test your output), the logic of the test is seriously flawed, unless you want to test the quality of the card in relation to itself, which is pretty pointless and useless to use to compare cards.
 
still, for 33 bucks (sb-live) beats the hell out of built in audio... i don't see large audio card makers useing the test software RMAA in reviews either...

the old cards are not as well built as the newer cards, or offer as much, and yes creative caught hell over the driver years back but that's old news, they fixed it, humm, somewhat, what version driver did they use to test with? i didn't bother reading the artical, there are many driver versions out there floating around the web...

i see unfinished test results posted...

on and on one could go, but not tonight please...
 
Teacher said:
thats cuz large audio card manufacturers like m-audio, echo, aardvark...want to lie about there specs..there specs represent lab measurements with white noise and other non real world things...cuz in the real world there products don't operate as well as the lab test show...whether this thing is or isn't flawed it is a real world audio test...and those manufactures would rather have the user find out then them tell'em
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its not a real world test... so you are telling me that when you record, you run the signal into an input (yes sounds good) then run it to an output and patch that back into another input and record that signal (?)... that is basically what this test does... only the sound source is internal. But the test still runs it through both convertors (in and out). That is not real world... I know of no-one who runs their signal through both convertors before recording or listening to it.
 
converter degradation is minimal after the first conversion...what they are doing is over the top..but if your sound card is rated good after all that you know you have a really good sound card...
 
Teacher said:
converter degradation is minimal after the first conversion...
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not if we are talking about newer sound blasters or other newer "multimedia" cards that have 24bit/96kHz output (for home theatre kind of stuff) but a 16bit/44.1kHz input... yeah sure, looping from the output to input will give an accurate reading on the output... give me a break. Its a flawed experiment. There is no control to determine what is good and what is not. Nothing to compare the results to. You can't accurately compare the results to other cards, because there is no controlled variable (either the same input taking readings from the output of different card or the outputs of different cards being read by the same input). The program is nothing short of high-tech "voo-doo"... it has nothing to do with science at all.
 
What you guys are saying, then, is that if your card sucks on this test, it can still be a great card?

Didn't think so.

That's why the test is valid, because even if ONLY the AD converters or ONLY the DA converters suck, that still mean your card is not great. So it just becomes a matter of how much "bad" you can tolerate. You do the test, and whether it's "flawed" or not, you will still know whether your card is a POS, decent, or fantastic.
 
exactly...

charger said:
What you guys are saying, then, is that if your card sucks on this test, it can still be a great card?

Didn't think so.

That's why the test is valid, because even if ONLY the AD converters or ONLY the DA converters suck, that still mean your card is not great. So it just becomes a matter of how much "bad" you can tolerate. You do the test, and whether it's "flawed" or not, you will still know whether your card is a POS, decent, or fantastic.
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charger said:
What you guys are saying, then, is that if your card sucks on this test, it can still be a great card?

Didn't think so.

That's why the test is valid, because even if ONLY the AD converters or ONLY the DA converters suck, that still mean your card is not great. So it just becomes a matter of how much "bad" you can tolerate. You do the test, and whether it's "flawed" or not, you will still know whether your card is a POS, decent, or fantastic.
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If you're ears can't tell you that then you have the wrong hobby.

My guess is that most consumer cards have much better playback specs then they do for recording. So where one card may be suitable for an editing/mixing DAW where the output is merely used for monitoring it would fall short as a recording card. This test would be not be able to differeniate any of that.
 
If you're ears can't tell you that then you have the wrong hobby.
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Not true. A Soundblaster card through a fantastic set of monitors will sound better than the best audio card you can find through crappy monitors. And the point of this article is to discuss low-end soundcards. We're not talking about the discriminating Tex's of the world, we're talking about people who do not understand that their Soundblaster is a POS, and would think you were speaking Greek if you said "jitter" and "clock source" in the same breath.

BTW, your guess is wrong. Most consumer cards go the other way... better A/D converters, compromise on the D/A.
 
re

sound blaster really is a crap!!!! agreeee!!! 100% i have audigy, i wanna switch to m-audio. everybody says m-audio is the best
 
charger said:
BTW, your guess is wrong. Most consumer cards go the other way... better A/D converters, compromise on the D/A.
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was not a guess and I already explained that I was referring to "home theatre" cards that output (D/A) 24bit/96KHz but only input 16bit/44.1kHz (A/D ... no need to have 24bit in on a home theatre card)... for these type of cards this test isn't very good (self explainatory). Now I thought I had explained that well enough the past 3 times, but there it is again incase it did not register the 1st 3 times.
 
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