Who Killed PC Audio

[rcf]

Onboard audio also supports 7.1 speakers, but surrounding yourself with lots of speakers is impractical because of the the hassle involved and because of the noise when you're gaming late at night.
Is there a survey about the audio setup of gamers?
The vast majority of gamers probably use onboard sound with crappy stereo speakers or headphones and can't or won't buy 7.1 setups, which is an argument for good 3D sound via stereo headphones.

 

[Malo]

Onboard audio also supports 7.1 speakers, but surrounding yourself with lots of speakers is impractical because of the the hassle involved and because of the noise when you're gaming late at night.
Is there a survey about the audio setup of gamers?
The vast majority of gamers probably use onboard sound with crappy stereo speakers or headphones and can't or won't buy 7.1 setups, which is an argument for good 3D sound via stereo headphones.

Well the only reason I personally would care about 7.1 audio is if I had a dedicated PC gaming setup in the living room. I have a HTPC but it's not capable of gaming, only streaming.

I just watched the video and was a really good discussion with the Creative product manager. Definitely helped add kindling to my desire for higher quality audio.

 

[Blazkowicz]

You don't really want to try to make noise with a "computer grade" 5.1 or 7.1 set up.
Like, a couple hundred buck for six speakers is pretty low end still.

The issue might be, what kind of room and furniture arrangement are you supposed to have? If gamers live in a one-bedroom (with PC in main room) or zero-bedroom appartment this might be a problem, unless you just turn it into a man cave so you can have speakers behind and beside you.

 

[swaaye]

I have a gaming HTPC with a 5.1 channel setup through receiver. It's mostly used for entertaining guests. Lots of Alien Isolation and RE7 sorts of games have been played there. Survival horror room. I don't feel that PC games are missing anything on the audio front in this configuration. Games seem to have the same audio production value as major movies.

I've never had any of the multichannel computer speaker packages. On my desktop I've always used 2.1 or headphones. I really like the Audio Technica open air headphones.

 

[Malo]

More and more games are supporting Dolby Atmos as well which is a great sign.

 

[Davros]

Vista's rejection of proprietary hardware-accelerated audio

not just proprietry but all hardware-accelerated audio

 

[BRiT]

I have a gaming HTPC with a 5.1 channel setup through receiver.

I have my 'gaming' desktop connected to my 7.1 Channel Receiver via HDMI. No need for onboard audio cards at all. I am amazed that any self-described dedicated gamer would ever consider NOT running an audio system through a receiver.

 

[BRiT]

not just proprietry but all hardware-accelerated audio

That's because when Microsoft used analytics to look through the crash logs of systems and found the cause of a significant portion of crashes was Creative audio drivers. They had to do something to provide system stability since Creative was incapable of doing so. Creative has no one to blame for this reaction by Microsoft other than themselves.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I have my 'gaming' desktop connected to my 7.1 Channel Receiver via HDMI. No need for onboard audio cards at all. I am amazed that any self-described dedicated gamer would ever consider NOT running an audio system through a receiver.

There's the silly issue of having to replace a HDMI 1.1 receiver with a HDMI 1.4 receiver and then a HDMI 2.0 receiver - is there a receiver that supports Displayport by the way? Receiver with Displayport 1.3 and Freesync?
Just bringing a mere technicality there. Also receivers for some reason need to be othersized like they're a 1970s piece of equipment with a huge linear power supply and discrete transistors.
But, I do agree this seems to be the best solution.

Regarding internal sound cards there seems to be an issue of very power hungry graphics card with very power hungry power management, that may bring noise to the analog outputs even on some high end sound cards. I wonder how much of a problem that is.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

not just proprietry but all hardware-accelerated audio

Was there any other doing hardware accelerated audio at the time, though?

Aureal had been bought long before, nvidia's soundstorm went away with the first xbox and all the other soundcard makers like turtlebeach and Asus could offer were simple codecs plus cpu processing of EAX 2.0

That's because when Microsoft used analytics to look through the crash logs of systems and found the cause of a significant portion of crashes was Creative audio drivers. They had to do something to provide system stability since Creative was incapable of doing so. Creative has no one to blame for this reaction by Microsoft other than themselves.

He addresses that claim and it's really bullshit. There's a ton of other well documented stuff that brought a lot more problems than Creative's soundcards. Like videocard drivers.

The largest reason was the X360 carrying a CPU based audio stack that Microsoft wanted to replicate in Windows for developer adoption so they blocked access to external audio APIs in DirectX.

 

[BRiT]

Of course that's the story that Creative will tell. They naturally wouldn't highlight their own incompetence.

 

[Davros]

Was there any other doing hardware accelerated audio at the time, though?

I dont think so

 

[Blazkowicz]

I've never had any of the multichannel computer speaker packages. On my desktop I've always used 2.1 or headphones. I really like the Audio Technica open air headphones.

I believe using a pair of monitor speakers is fairly popular (and easily affordable). They're like the headphones of speakers. Stereo only but you ought to get very nice precision and they can be used for everything.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I've been using Logitech 5.1 channel speaker systems for the past 10 years or so. Great stuff. I previously used their high end speakers (450 USD+) and they reproduced audio respectably for that price range while taking up less space than I'd have needed for a receiver + speakers. I'm currently using their budget oriented Z506 5.1 speakers (I think I paid around 65-70 USD on them. Audio reproduction, especially at the low end, is significantly worse than their high end offering that I replaced, but it's still sufficient for computer gaming.

I do music listening and movie watching in the other room via my HTPC hooked up to a 7.1 channel receiver via HDMI.

Regards,
SB

 

[Malo]

I believe using a pair of monitor speakers is fairly popular (and easily affordable). They're like the headphones of speakers. Stereo only but you ought to get very nice precision and they can be used for everything.

This is what I use, a pair of M-Audio monitors speakers.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I have the great Gigaworks S750 system. Back when I was living in my parents' house, I had the speakers very decently set in the ceiling and bookshelves. My room was my man cave.
Now I have to split the office with the wife so I can only set it as a pseudo 5.1 in the desk
Not a huge problem because the living room has a very decent AV Receiver with a Jamo 5.1 setup. But my HTPC isn't as up-to-date as my desktop in the office. The GTX 660 Ti definitely wasn't a great purchase at the time.

There's the silly issue of having to replace a HDMI 1.1 receiver with a HDMI 1.4 receiver and then a HDMI 2.0 receiver

And now HDMI 2.1. Plus, no one out there seems able/willing to make a device that extracts the audio stream from HDMI other than the 25 year-old SPDIF standards. I now own a 4K HDR TV that renders both PCM and all the high-resolution formats completely useless if I want to watch 4K content. All I can use is ARC which outputs vanilla Dolby Digital, DTS or stereo PCM.
The stupidest part here is the receivers' price is heavily influenced by the quality of its analog components, making the purchase of a good receiver the most frustrating thing ever, whenever a new HDMI standard comes up.
I guess the only solution left for me is to get a HDMI 2.0 graphics card that sends the audio through one HDMI port while sending the video through another port (if such a thing is even possible).

is there a receiver that supports Displayport by the way? Receiver with Displayport 1.3 and Freesync?
Just bringing a mere technicality there.

FreeSync will most probably be formally supported through HDMI 2.1's Game Mode Variable Refresh Rate.
Meaning any receiver maker that wants to support HDMI 2.1 for that 8K bulletpoint then it needs to support FreeSync.
As for DisplayPort, I don't really see the benefit of doing so. Are you going to hook up a high-end computer monitor to a home theater setup?

Of course that's the story that Creative will tell. They naturally wouldn't highlight their own incompetence.

You honestly believe that back in 2004/2005 "most of the OS crashes" with sound blaster users came from the audio driver?
This was the time of Geforce FX and early days of Geforce 6. I had a 9700 Pro, then a pair of 6800GT SLI and then a X1900 XT.
All throughout this time I had a SB Live!, then an Audigy 2 and then a X-Fi XtremeGamer. I did see the drivers getting bloated and slow due to too much featurecreep just like he mentions, but I recall very well where most of my crashes came from, and they didn't come from my soundcards. My ratio of graphics-related CTDs to sound-related CTDs were probably close to 10:1.
Kind reminder that this was also the age of Netburst Intel CPUs and everyone plus their dogs were overclocking, even the ones with Athlon 64 who didn't really need to do it.

 

[BRiT]

I never said most, I said significant. And yes, that has happened. I myself had several Windows crashes where the sound was stuttering and the dumps were in audio drivers. So when Creative says they were not the cause of machine crashes, take that with a huge mountain of salt, because their drivers have caused many crashes in Windows.

 

[Gubbi]

The advent of multicore processors with SIMD rendered dedicated sound processing hardware obsolete. What needed a dedicated high power DSP i 2000, needed just a few percent of a single core in 2007. At the same time Microsoft wanted to virtualize the entire audio subsystem, where the number of channels issoftware defined instead of by hardware.

It was an easy choice, - and a correct one.

Cheers

 

[Davros]

The advent of multicore processors with SIMD rendered dedicated sound processing hardware obsolete

I disagree, if cpu's started doing what dsp's did then you may have a case

 

[Silent_Buddha]

All throughout this time I had a SB Live!, then an Audigy 2 and then a X-Fi XtremeGamer. I did see the drivers getting bloated and slow due to too much featurecreep just like he mentions, but I recall very well where most of my crashes came from, and they didn't come from my soundcards. My ratio of graphics-related CTDs to sound-related CTDs were probably close to 10:1.

I had all those cards as well as prior Creative Labs cards as well as Pro Audio Spectrum cards.

The SB Live was definitely problematic under Windows causing system instability as well as crashes. Many forums at the time (both internet and local BBS) had many threads from users asking for help. I fared better WRT stability than many other SB Live owners that had problems. I fixed most of my stability issues by manually setting which IRQ the card was using as well as disabling something within the SB Live driver software (I don't remember what it was). There was one driver release that I remember, however, that just could not be used without constant crashes.

I had no problems with the Audigy but did have to help some friends that had issues with it. The X-Fi like the SB Live brought some issues that I could resolve via tinkering with the drivers as well as a setting or two in the MB BIOS.

One friend of mine got so fed up with the crashes caused by the SB Live in his system that he took it out into his back yard and shot it multiple times with a 12-guage shotgun. That made me sad as I liked the card, which I often recommended to people. But Creative Labs were absolutely horrible with drivers for it. I probably had to help 3 out of 10 people that got the card on my recommendation with problems they had after installation of the SB Live. Either way, that friend's computer went back to being mostly stable again once he'd removed the SB Live.

Ah, tech support was interesting back in those days. Helping people resolve IRQ and DMA conflicts, so...fun... Helping them get a driver that wouldn't crash their games or OS when they didn't have internet was, challenging. And when they did have internet, it was usually dial-up...and it used the line they called for help on.

HP (horrible printer drivers that caused issues in Windows) as well as Creative Labs definitely earned their reputation for crap driver quality.

Regards,
SB