SoundBlaster Live 24Bit Ext, Looking for an upgrade

WeatherMan

WeatherMan

Active Member
Hay guys...

I've had my Live 24Bit External sound card for quite some time now..

Have my Acoustic Energy Setup well & truly broken in, I have no problem with creative or anything, however I feel like a change. I'm on the hunt for a new soundcard..

Mine costs £38 new now, Cannot find any reviews about it on the net, apart from user reviews, what I'm really looking for is a comparison between mine and some other high end cards.

I'm looking for something that will give me some better quality. My max budget is £100. I've been eyeing up the Asus Xonar D2.

What's bugging me though is because I can't find any reviews on the net I can't compare it to anything, so have no idea how much of a step up i'd be making?

Any suggestions on card's. Or maybe someone has actually taken on the upgrade from a 24BL External?

Cheers

Edit: Found a review here -http://mt-utility.blogspot.com/2006/12/review-creative-live-24-bit-external.html
My main audio target is music listening :)
 
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No sure what you mean by quality. If you mean sound quality then you won't change that by changing the sound card. The sound card is basically an ADC/DAC and, contrary to what you will read, they all do the same thing, albeit in different ways. The quality of the sound derives from the speakers and that statement assumes an amplifier without audible distortion powerful enough to drive the speakers. If you want to improve the sound, change the speakers.
 
I've been reccomended to upgrade the soundcard and not the speakers over at headfi :confused:

I'm pretty happy with my speakers right now, would have to spend around $500+ to get anything much better and that would be going with some decent hifi kit + amp, which I can't warrant right now, So far I've upgraded from onboard to a cheap 5.1PCI card to my live and have had better clarity each time, just looking for that last step, a card/dac that I can keep for any future setup (Well maybe:P) Been told that most of the simple non frills, cards from MAudio & others would be much better than my current card.

Something specialised for Analogue only stereo out using a good DAC, which is what the 2496 is

I'd say the soundcard is the weakest link in my setup right now which is why I'm looking to upgrade it :)

I know the sound difference will be very microscopic at best, but i'll be purchasing this for future speaker setups, and right now I just want to maximise the Aego's potential, which I know I can't do with this mid level card :)
 
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Can you tell me why there will be no improvement?

Surely its better to have a good Source & a good Amp than a Bad Source & good amp.

I know the amp is at the end of the line, but if I'm using a better dac, then the amp is getting fed higher quality 'material', and from past experience I know that the output will change slightly.

If a soundcard didn't matter at all, wouldn't people just be sticking with onboard, and not boasting about how much better their speakers sound after an upgrade :confused:
 
I don't have time to write a book about it but I'll provide a few insights. Firstly, ignore what people tell you about sonic improvements. The only way to test sonic improvements accurately is to do a bias controlled listening test with both products tested back to back. Relying on memory causes what we call placebo effect. What that means in a nutshell is that, when audible differences are subtle to non existent, we hear what we expect to hear. If we expect an improvement, our brain will tell us there was an improvement. Our hearing is loaded with bias. Also, bias controlled listening requires exact level matching because our brain intereprets louder as better. We level match with a digital voltmeter to within a few millivolts. There is an entire high end audio industry that survives because of the plecebo phenomenon.

I spent ten years testing DAC's. I tested 16 bit dacs and 24 bit dacs and 1 bit dacs. Never once did I encounter a meaningful audible difference between any of them in bias controlled listening tests using a panel of 10 audiophiles. To be accurate, I should say that I never encountered a difference in units manufactured after 1988. Some of the early ones were flaky.

Anyone who tells you one DAC performs better than another is either lying, ignorant or trying to sell you something. Most of the time they are ignorant. The DAC is a perfected technology. It works accurately every time. The DAC on your main board, the DAC on your sound card and the DAC in a $3500 stand alone unit, all do the same thing with the same results. That isn't opinion. That's a result of 10 years of scientific testing.

Two other elements play into reproducing audio. One is the amplification and the final one is the speaker system. The amplifier is not terribly important although it can be more important than the DAC. The amplifier has to have inaudible distortion and be powerful enough to drive the speakers at the required volume level without causing such distortion by clipping the waveforms. Low distortion is not much of an issue since the modern op-amps used in these circuits are very, very, very low in distortion. Amplifiers on computer main boards and on computer sound cards are very small in terms of power - just milliwatts. If we try to drive the speakers to high volume levels with these units, they will distort. You should have a couple of watts at least to get truly clean sound. If you have a sound card that does that or a speaker system with a built in amp, you are probably in better shape than you would be with the audio on your mainboard. This isn't a difference in DAC's, just in amplifier power.

So that gets us down to the speakers. In any audio system, the speakers are the high distortion device. Not only do they have a lot of inherent distortion but they have frequency response characteristics that vary all over the board because of driver type and size, crossover networks and enclosures. So basically, while the downstream parts of an audio system don't have a very strong effect on the sound you hear, the speakers really do. You can compare the speaker in your cell phone to the ones in your stereo or home theater system to get a vivid demonstration of that fact. Speakers are everything in an audio system. All the rest of the system combined doesn't represent even 1% of the importance of the speakers. People will tell you otherwise but those people haven't done the testing.

The speakers are what matter. Period.
 
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