What's up with computer audio?
There’s a very good article/test on TweakTown about computeraudio. In short, it describes the consumerdemand for fast videocards but who’s caring about audio? Well I do for instance and I’m a big fan of nVIDIA’s SoundStorm APU. But somehow imho, audiophiles think it’s not serious enough (they rather spend 3500 euro on a CD-transport) and gamers just don’t care (while a fast soundcard gains you fps as well… but they rather spend it on a SLI-setup ;-) ).
Anyway, a motherboard with the nVIDIA APU(like my A7N8X-E deluxe) connected digitally to a home-cinemareceiver gives extremely good value. The on-the-fly Dolby Digital encoder(I can’t emphasize this enough) enables you to produce a dolby-digital(AC3)-stream from anything on-the-fly! (eat that, Creative) and it will be decoded by your home-cinema receiver with it’s good quality DAC’s (better than any DAC on a soundcard for sure)...
So as long as the customer doesn’t demand better audio, we just don’t get it… so skip your next videocard (which is going to be dumped anyhow a year later) and invest in better audio, it’s worth it ;-)
and anyone telling you a Soundblaster Live! is still a decent soundcard… well in that aspect a TNT2 is also a very good videocard and would you put that in a 2004 computersystem?...
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