OpenAL was supposed to be a replacement of sorts, but Creative’s list of games with OpenAL audio hasn’t been updated since 2008. Creative’s EAX positional audio scheme died years ago. Games used to drive the demand for hardware-accelerated audio, but that feature has all but disappeared from recent titles. To be frank, the market for them has largely stagnated. Moving considerably slower than the speed of soundīefore we dig into the Xonars, it’s worth taking a moment to expand on why sound cards tend to last so long. We’ve also thrown in our favorite mid-range sound card, the Xonar DX, and a motherboard with Realtek’s latest audio codec. How do the two compare, and more importantly, how good do they sound? We’ve conducted a mix of performance, signal quality, and blind listening tests to find out. Meanwhile, the DSX offers home-theater users a replaceable op-amp, support for more output channels, and the ability to encode multichannel digital bitstreams in real-time. The DGX courts headphone users with a dedicated amplifier and Dolby Headphone surround-sound virtualization. The Xonar DGX and DSX drop into any PCIe x1 slot, and those should be with us for a good, long time.Įach card has a unique character. Those older models have PCI interfaces, like an awful lot of other sound cards, and PCI slots are quickly disappearing from modern motherboards. If the names look familiar, that’s because the cards are the PCI Express versions of the Xonar DG and DS. Indeed, the two we’ll be putting under the microscope today-Asus’ Xonar DGX and DSX-sell for less than $50. They’re amazingly inexpensive considering the expected lifespan.
#REALTEK ALC1150 VS ASUS XONAR UPGRADE#
Good sound cards tend to last through multiple upgrade cycles, too. They simply sound better than the typical integrated audio on motherboards, especially for those with discerning ears and halfway-decent speakers or headphones. For years, we’ve trumpeted the benefits of discrete sound cards.