| soulsamurai said: Heres a little something that's a bit of an eye opener from The Tech Report describes what it's like when you don't know what your really missing with audio.... That brings me to the question we posed at the beginning of this review, which is whether you really need a sound card at all. The simple answer is no. You can get by with integrated audio and live blissfully unaware of what you're missing or stubbornly claim that no difference exists. I bet you could get by playing games at lower resolutions and without antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, too. You probably don't really need a solid-state drive to load games a few seconds faster, and you'd likely survive with two CPU cores rather than four or six. The question is not whether you need those upgrades, but if they're worth the additional expense. In the case of the $30 Xonar DG, the answer is a definitive yes. If you have halfway decent headphones or speakers, the DG offers a very real step up in sound quality for what amounts to a pittance. |
Bold/underline is the key part of the entire aguement.
Its not just the $30 additional card, but also the $nnn cost for quality speakers/surround/headphones that are required. I still argue that unlike video, super quality-quality audio is not as much of a benefit to the mass consumer.
I worked for 10yrs as a commision sales person with Circuit City well before it went under. I continuously lived in the audio dept and the high end sound room. I know exactly the quality differences you're speaking about. I just argue that I don't see, or hear rather, the value difference as I do with video. I literally hear the difference, just not to a point where I'm willing to add a couple hundred dollars to the cost of my build.
