Aaaah, and by "many" you must mean the Realtec chip, the other Realtec chip and the Realtec chip. Oh perhaps i am forgetting the newest Realtec chip? Because there is nothing else apart from a couple of different onboard solutions which are present in 2 or 3 motherboards from the hundreds of current models in circulation and the thousands of past recent models. And i am quite aware of Tom's and they 're ordinary listeners just like everyone on the planet, not sound experts, nor they claim to be as such. Keep in mind that ever since Tom, the originator of the site left eons ago and Tom's has been bought the last years by a major media corp, their "opinion" is -not so- strangely biased, as well as Anandtech's which follows the same paradigm and is owned by the same corp. To me this kind of expressed publicly opinion is the start of obsolence. They should keep to the stuff they comprehend thoroughally imho.

Well, connect the SPDIF of a Realtec "card" to a digital input in any functioning DA device and do your own test. Chances are you will hear all sorts of clicks, pops, crackles, and other noises. Because you never heard of these, it doesn't mean the forums don't contain a lot of complaints about this. Jitter is just the standard occurence with Realtec chips. And yes agreed, perhaps i was wrong putting it as "properly shielded", it was the best term i could think of atm, albeit a misleading one, excuse me for that bit please. But, as mentioned, it is always to the motherboard's implementation if the same Realtec will sound ok-ish or not. Btw, i never mentioned signal loss, how did this come to the chat, beats me...
You have a nice one mate
PS: It is only logical, employees of a certain brand to favor what will not "shake" their company position (or threaten their job in other words) in the visible tests. Why take it as an example, blind tests are the only ones that matter.

 

Last edited: Jul 16, 2018

The person that was sitting next to me and intimately knows the sound signature of my room and I both were a little shocked when we together first listened to the mix of one of their songs that had been worked on until completion, this immediately after installing the Babyface. We looked at each other, our eyes widening in a kind of almost disbelief from the music emanating from the speakers. The sound stage was wider with a greater sense of depth. My second reaction was that I really didn't like what I heard because my sense of reference was now stranged out. It took a few weeks to calm my aural sensibilities until I became used to the new sound. The difference for me was palatable. The both of us were not expecting much of a difference but were confronted with one nonetheless.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 16, 2018

I don't doubt your sincerity. But I still think it is entirely possible you are fooling yourself.

It happens to everyone of us. Have you ever tweaked an effect, maybe an EQ or a reverb and then only later realized it was on bypass or on different channel. But for a while you could have swore you absolutely heard the change while you were making the tweaks. I certainly have.

I have done quite serious audio work with almost like a bandbass filter type EQ accidentally still enabled on my EMU dsp from the other night (used it to make sense of a badly recorded youtube video). I didn't notice it when mixing. It should have been clear as day something was seriously wrong, but without immediate reference point my brain just rolled with it.

 

Through windows? And it works with browsers, games, whatever? If so, how? I'd love to know. ;)



On the audio 'quality' thing, I saw an article on blind tests which showed no general ability to distinguish higher bitrates etc amongst listeners. Except, strangely enough, amongst women - who were more likely to get it "wrong" - they preferred the "lower" quality examples!

Generally, the more expensive something is, the more I prefer it. :D

Yes, that's what always struck me about it. I imagine there must be a bit more to it than that though. Some hocus pocus techie musical stuff......

 

Last edited: Jul 16, 2018

Yes. Just disable and uninstall the MoBo soundcard driver and just use the ASIO audio interface (only). Simple.

 

What makes you think YouTube running in a browser (for instance) is using ASIO? Surely it is using WDM, and operating at whatever settings you put in Win Control Panel? Can you play sounds from a browser and a videogame (or whatever) at the same time? If so, surely it is WDM?

 

What does this mean?

 

Too much defaults, obvs...... :D

 

Of course, who hasn't? I usually catch myself after a few seconds after tweaking the eq of the wrong track and wondering confusededly why it sounds the same, but as I said, I catch my error because I realize in a short amount of time that there is actually no change at all. My experience with my two sound cards is completely different. Moving backward through time, the converters in the sampler were totally different in my Kurzweil 2500XS compared to my Alesis ADAT machines and I could tell right away which was which. Microphones have different signatures, monitors as well as guitars. Included in the list are sound cards. They certainly don't all sound the same, it would be truthful to say that that it would be impossible that they could due to different designs in the way even the same converter chips are utilized. True, these days the differences are much slighter than they used to be on the whole, but the study that you are using to negate real life, repeatable observations have no bearing on the experiences of others. You are basing your argument on one very relaxed test without a control group, a very small sample pool and other scientific guidlines which basically extrapolates to no solid conclusion at all except the result that day with that group of people...as far as I know from your post which is anecdotal. If you yourself can not for whatever reason hear differences between two fairly dissimilar sound cards then so be it, but to throw up a blanket statement such as you have is a bit silly to me and probably so too for the many others that can. In my room with my reference there is a concrete difference between the two cards, of that I am sure.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 17, 2018

Ofc I can play all sounds at the same time (game, browser, DAW, VLC, wave browser, etc). I've been doing so since 2001 iirc.
It's been years since I even opened the windows mixer/controller. I'm using my audio interface's dedicated software/mixer/controller.

 

Probably if you compare a 200$ cheap usb interface with a Realtek onboard chip you don't (won't) hear any difference but make your test with a 1000$/1500$ RME /Universal Audio / Antelope /Apogee interface and I promise you you'll hear a BIG difference.Anyway 100%sure with a RME which I have.

 

The focusrite are good audio interfaces imho. They color the sound slightly in a good way, regarding pre for recording. RME is much more "transparent", at least that's my experience with the fireface UCX after having had a focusrite saffire pro 24.
What was really dreadfull with the focusrite was the drivers. Unstable as hell, next to it the fireface is a dream. Also the rme totalmix thingy is top, really good.
I've never found the onboard realtech stuff to be even remotely good. It's just not good a all, if you want to work audio on your computer probably best to avoid possibly absolutely, if you have any choice on the matter.

Oh and regarding RME, windows sounds and many apps in windows aren't processed by default through Asio. Some softwares, AIMP3 for example for audio player, allow you to do it but most don't. Browser, video player, none of it is handled through asio.

 

No actually selecting in windows the RME audio interface and suppressing other interfaces won't do it, since windows by default and design doesn't use asio at all to process audio. It still uses its own driver even if you select your asio interface. Like in your daw, you have to select the asio drivers in the soft you use - when and if it's possible but it's rarely the case - in order to bypass windows audio drivers (and then for windows no audio is processed and you can't even see any flux in the volume section of windows).
Or you can use third party soft to bypass windows audio drivers by routing the audio before it....
Mac does it by default, cause it has good audio drivers native, not windows, wether it's 7 or 10 (which is a freaking shame. I would have uploaded to this bloatware if asio was native, unbelievable they didn't do at least that)...

 

Ofc! I was just saying in regards of the topic (between G String and I), to use ASIO instead of MoBo audio interface and its drivers.

 

Last edited: Jul 17, 2018

My bad, I misunderstood you. We are in agreement. You can select indeed your outboard audio interface to process all audio in windows, even if it isn't always with asio drivers. No need at all for those crappy onboard audio chips.

Upon new installation I disable them in the bios and thus never even bother installing their drivers.

 

Then we are saying the same thing.
Cheers!

 

Later I wrote:

 

Then we are all saying the same thing. ;)

Except we're surely not. I think Talmi and myself are saying the same thing. Most applications speak to the windows kernel and just use Win libraries to handle audio, whereas ASIO bypasses the kernel. Maybe your device can handle both at the same time, which would be ideal, but generally they don't. For instance, how would a device know how to handle incoming 16 bit samples at 44k whilst simultaneously playing 24bit 96k, etc? I can imagine a single device being composed of essentially several devices but that would demand several ad/da converters and would be complicated and expensive and perhaps have high latency as all the various streams are mixed into one. The device would have to wait for Windows Primary Sound Driver in the Kernel to do its stuff, and likely everything would be always waiting for the kernel to finish its stuff - meaning high latency and thus undermining the point of such fancy kit.

If you have your DAW playing stuff at 24/96, say, and you play a YouTube video in a browser, do all the sounds - coming out of your single device (not through a mixing desk) - all play correctly? I don't mean to doubt you, I just don't understand how it can be so, and if my conception of sound in Windows is wrong then I'd like to know how it is wrong. I use two sound devices to escape Win limitations and two amplifiers (to avoid need of a mixing desk). Maybe your device's mixing software is taking Windows sound and mixing it into an ASIO stream? That'd be a nice solution.

ETA- I went looking at Babyface - very nice! I found this in a manual for MixControl:

To my mind, Babyface is also a mixer and, at some low level is incorporating WDM (Win sound/mixer). Wow. I want one. I get the impression RME are the gold standard in drivers - hell, they're bypassing waiting on Microsoft to get their shit together. Nice. Drivers and software seem to work on everything too (even if MixControl looks a bit complicated - yikes!) On topic, I feel pretty certain it would sound much better than my much cheaper setup. :D I'm quite blown away by Babyface. I was hoping to get a VR headset, but maybe my priority has just changed.

Ah, you meant faults, not defaults? :D

 

Last edited: Jul 17, 2018

@G String RME interfaces are beasts,
over time, through my hands went Fireface 800, UFX, Fireface 802, UC, Babyface, MADIface XT, UFX II, HDSPe AIO, HDSPe AES and few others I can't recall anymore,
once you get used to TotalMix FX, all its DSP power including Loopback feature, rock-solid never-disappointing drivers, multi-client mode and all the other goodies, it's literally impossible to go for anything inferior

 

You have clearly made up your mind. I'm just going to say this: I don't believe I have been making unwarranted blanket statements. I try to avoid those.

...The people who get a new more expensive interface and think the sound is suddenly much better are in my humble opinion in most cases just fooling themselves.

...I don't doubt your sincerity. But I still think it is entirely possible you are fooling yourself.

You are calling the - in my opinion quite well constructed - blind test "anecdotal". I don't even understand why feel you need to cast doubt on the test. It obviously did not claim your two sound cards (or your late 90s musical instrument) sound the same and nor did I. Neither did the test claim there was no difference between the devices tested or that no-one can hear the differences.

Yet at the same time you seem to regard your personal experience in completely uncontrolled-non-blind-not-even-immediate-ab -conditions as the infallible truth. A lot of people have had similar experiences and appealed to their personal experience, golden ears, and then utterly failed when proper simple controls are applied. I am simply pointing out it is entirely possible you too are making a similar mistake. Sometimes people believe in their prior personal experience in uncontrolled conditions so deeply they simply refuse to believe the results of their own blind tests.

There is this classic infamous quite bananas quote from the editor of Stereophile, John Atkinson:

But when you have taken part in a number of these blind tests and experienced how two amplifiers you know from personal experience to sound extremely different can still fail to be identified under blind conditions, then perhaps an alternative hypothesis is called for: that the very procedure of a blind listening test can conceal small but real subjective differences. Having taken part in quite a number of such blind tests, I have become convinced of the truth in this hypothesis.

Some people will even come up with various conspiracy theories and resort to pure ad hominem attacks against people conducting sincere proper blind tests. At that point I choose not to engage with those people. (I'm not blaming you for this).

In your case, I simply think you should at least take into consideration the real possibility that you might be fooling yourself. And even if you still think you are probably right, you surely understand why other people don't have much reason to trust the accuracy of your personal experiences. No matter how sincere they think you are.