ALC1220 codec compared to ASUS strix soar sound card?

[Lord Flashheart]

Hi all
I am maybe upgrading my motherboard in the coming months for various reasons.
Presently I have a 3600X m 32GB DDR4 3200 cl14 & MSI B450 tomahawk.
The sound card I use which a bought about 4 yerars ago is the ASUS Xonar SOAR.

https://www.asus.com/Sound-Cards/STRIX-SOAR/

I am very happy with i and bought it when using an older setup with dismal onboard audio.

The motherboard I a kind of keen on is the ASrock B550 Taichi which is not out yet.
I will of course await until reviews before making a decision.

Presently the machine is just for gaming but that will change.

There will not be the room for the sound card in that boards due to the slots and other deviceswhat I want to put in it.

So does anyone know how good the onbaord audio is.
Apparently ACL1220 is very common it seems.
Will it match the sound card in quality?

Useful info appreciated.

Thanks

[xSOSxHawkens]

It will be good, and if you use your system with a HT reciever over TOSLINK it will probably feture DTS Neo or DD-Live.

But no, it will not be as good. Some will argue, but most either have never tired hardware audio, or havent done so in a decade or more and think soundcards are obsolete or un-needed.

If you have enjoyed the audio card you have you will likely notice a loss in quality. Not huge. Kinda like the difference between 4K and 1440P. But enough you will probably notice.

That said it will be more than good enough I am guessing. And if you *really* miss the hardware level experiance you can look into external DAC/AMP's (for pure quality) or external sound cards from the likes of Creative (for things like 3D positional audio quality in movie and games).

[pasa]

Does it matter really? You can't buy a mobo without an audio codec. The actual quality you observe is barely dependent on the chip but on all the other elements surrounding it, that may vary largely between mobo vendors and models. Use your own ears, if it suits you, then it is okay, isn't it?

The discussion pops up many times but is never fruitful, as everyone compares it with different things to start with, and have different devices on the chain. And we not even got to the part that sound perception is subjective.

[iceman1980]

Objectively the soundcard will be a powered amp. I own an ASUS STX II essence 7.1 with Dolby headphone 7.1 on any headphone with the capability to drive high impedance headphones. (Hardware level Dolby headphone) not the software Atmos one.

In general personally I've found my soundcard to have more depth than my builtin. But if you don't listen to music without a wide-enough bandwidth you can't notice it. The also significant lack of distortion plays a big part as well.

Creative cards are superior in a lot of ways but they only have a 1 year warranty. ASUS ones come with 3 years by default. Creative models have an insane 32bit sampling with a 384Khz cycles so 384,000 captures every 1 second or the reciprocal of cycles is time. in seconds.

2.60416e-6 seconds = or 2.60416 microseconds at 32bit sample resolution. 384Khz / 1 = 1 / 384Khz So if this is looked at when expressed in a sinewave (roughly) every cycle will have 4+ billion possible sample states. So when a discrete digital waveform is presented and the staircase pattern it's similar to aliasing because there is more stairs the audiowave form can be far more closely approximated and therefore sound superior in everyway.

So this is a base 2 representation of
2616 = 65,536 discrete sample states.
2^24 = 16,777,216‬ discrete sample states
2^32 = 4,294,967,296‬ discrete sample states.

So does a sound card matter? Yes. Lower distortion and higher Dynamic range allows you a wider gradient of "sounds"

[Lord Flashheart]

I am getting the impression I am better off using it.
The reasons to use or not use are a little complex.
For that motherboard I was thinking of putting a network card in the slot - specifically a quad nic. They are cheap on ebay. It would have a direct connection to the my NAS. They would be setup in aggragate.
If I use the sound card it means I need to get a 2.5 Gigiabit card to put in the NAS for the speeds I need. So connect from the B550 taichi to the NAS and bridge it to to the NAS onboard.

Hopefully there will be a cheapish B550 motherboard with both a 1 & 2.5 gigiabit connections.

Anyone know of any?

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

I am getting the impression I am better off using it.
The reasons to use or not use are a little complex.
For that motherboard I was thinking of putting a network card in the slot - specifically a quad nic. They are cheap on ebay. It would have a direct connection to the my NAS. They would be setup in aggragate.
If I use the sound card it means I need to get a 2.5 Gigiabit card to put in the NAS for the speeds I need. So connect from the B550 taichi to the NAS and bridge it to to the NAS onboard.

Hopefully there will be a cheapish B550 motherboard with both a 1 & 2.5 gigiabit connections.

Anyone know of any?

What could you possibly be doing to need a quadnic? Also you won't be able to use a Quadnic. Especially if you are planning on teaming them together Windows 10 won't do it. To actually leverage NIC teaming you need Windows Server. So your loadbalanced link aggregation into your NAS will not work without NIC teaming otherwise you are going to have to contend with aggregation problems like MAC address conflicts.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

I am getting the impression I am better off using it.
The reasons to use or not use are a little complex.
For that motherboard I was thinking of putting a network card in the slot - specifically a quad nic. They are cheap on ebay. It would have a direct connection to the my NAS. They would be setup in aggragate.
If I use the sound card it means I need to get a 2.5 Gigiabit card to put in the NAS for the speeds I need. So connect from the B550 taichi to the NAS and bridge it to to the NAS onboard.

Hopefully there will be a cheapish B550 motherboard with both a 1 & 2.5 gigiabit connections.

Anyone know of any?

Best bet would be a 2,5g single nic.

Unless you are using the NAS as something like a video edditing productiuon storage space you will have more than enough bandwidth for most uses @ 250MB/s network transfer speeds. Also, unless its a non-consumer NAS, chances are it cant feed data at that rate enyway, and if it can proibably only if sequential reads unless ur NAS is outfitted with SSD storage.

If you need more than that you are still better off with a single NIC, either through 10Gbe or through other means (optical etc).

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di xSOSxHawkens:

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

I am getting the impression I am better off using it.
The reasons to use or not use are a little complex.
For that motherboard I was thinking of putting a network card in the slot - specifically a quad nic. They are cheap on ebay. It would have a direct connection to the my NAS. They would be setup in aggragate.
If I use the sound card it means I need to get a 2.5 Gigiabit card to put in the NAS for the speeds I need. So connect from the B550 taichi to the NAS and bridge it to to the NAS onboard.

Hopefully there will be a cheapish B550 motherboard with both a 1 & 2.5 gigiabit connections.

Anyone know of any?

Best bet would be a 2,5g single nic.

Unless you are using the NAS as something like a video edditing productiuon storage space you will have more than enough bandwidth for most uses @ 250MB/s network transfer speeds.

If you need more than that you are still better off with a single NIC, either through 10Gbe or through other means (optical etc).

I swear this person has no clue how network engineering works...

[xSOSxHawkens]

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

Messaggio originale di xSOSxHawkens:

Best bet would be a 2,5g single nic.

Unless you are using the NAS as something like a video edditing productiuon storage space you will have more than enough bandwidth for most uses @ 250MB/s network transfer speeds.

If you need more than that you are still better off with a single NIC, either through 10Gbe or through other means (optical etc).

I swear this person has no clue how network engineering works...

... ffs man, are you just out to pick bones.

Nothing I said is in any way incorrect for consumer grade gear...

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di xSOSxHawkens:

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

I swear this person has no clue how network engineering works...

... ffs man, are you just out to pick bones.

Nothing I said is in any way incorrect for consumer grade gear...

I'm referring to the person who originally posted. They ask utterly ridiculous questions about things they should ALREADY KNOW, then proceed to talk about what they will do, with no comprehension of how it even works.

For him to do "optical" as you called it he will need several SFPs with LC-Lucent cables(Most common) And if he wants to do Optical -> to Optical that will need a switch worth about $1200 Minimum. The UBNT 10G (EdgeSwitch 16 XG) 16 port optical switch comes to mind.

Bare in mind each SFP module could cost upwards of $100 - $200 (UBNT sell packs of 2 for this much) . You could use DAC - Direct Attach Copper however these are limited to very short lengths. As the frequency they operate in is well beyond that of conventional "Ethernet" Also
you need to be aware of another sticky concept in Fibre-optic communication MMF- Multimode Fibre or SMF- Single-Mode Fibre (One is significantly more expensive than the other) then you've also got to take into consideration if it's Fine-core fibre or Wide-core fibre same as MMF and SMF.

So you need to buy either SMF cable and SMF modules (Overkill for short distances)
or you buy MMF and MMF Modules (Most common for shorter less aggregation type networks)


I'm tired of explaining this to... naive individuals.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Ahh, my bad then.

And yeh, SFP would be prohibatively expensive, thus the recomendation for the 10Gbe if he *really* needed more...

But again, little need for the normal home user to require more than 2.5Gbe, specially to most consumer grade NAS units with HDD's.

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di xSOSxHawkens:

Ahh, my bad then.

And yeh, SFP would be prohibatively expensive, thus the recomendation for the 10Gbe if he *really* needed more...

But again, little need for the normal home user to require more than 2.5Gbe, specially to most consumer grade NAS units with HDD's.

He doesn't need more. He doesn't run high-loaded VM's he doesn't run SQL backend database management like Grafana etc. He doesn't even use his NAS for programming (This takes next to no resources local hosted Gitlabs(Hugs his private Code storage). Heck I don't even use Plex my opinion is why the hell would I store X number of movies on a NAS, when I have a Blu-ray player??? Might be a more clever idea to take the Blu-rays set them up in a rack and label them by room. That way it gets them out of the cabinets and into a central place keep the movies in the same place. Then use a Logitech Harmony networked.

If his NAS is most of the time Idle he should have just gone with a backup plan rather than an active NAS.

[Lord Flashheart]

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

I am getting the impression I am better off using it.
The reasons to use or not use are a little complex.
For that motherboard I was thinking of putting a network card in the slot - specifically a quad nic. They are cheap on ebay. It would have a direct connection to the my NAS. They would be setup in aggragate.
If I use the sound card it means I need to get a 2.5 Gigiabit card to put in the NAS for the speeds I need. So connect from the B550 taichi to the NAS and bridge it to to the NAS onboard.

Hopefully there will be a cheapish B550 motherboard with both a 1 & 2.5 gigiabit connections.

Anyone know of any?

What could you possibly be doing to need a quadnic? Also you won't be able to use a Quadnic. Especially if you are planning on teaming them together Windows 10 won't do it. To actually leverage NIC teaming you need Windows Server. So your loadbalanced link aggregation into your NAS will not work without NIC teaming otherwise you are going to have to contend with aggregation problems like MAC address conflicts.

I understand the drivers for the intel nics have the option to aggragate them..

Maybe the terminology is out with aggregation I mean multiple nics acting as one.
oh wait no support on windows 10 - so sad.
When did I claim it was for windows 10 anyway?
It is a dual boot with linux.


My NAS is an old machine with freenas installed. It works well. There are options to aggregate the NICs using that also.

As for any windows at all for any type of server - NO THANKS.


So the benefit for gaming are virtualisation options are available on freenas. My games are backed up there. Overnight updates are done to the backup through a caching server. It is straight forward to setup & use. It is on a virtualised ubunu server.
Game updates through steam can be fast.

Unfortunately I am stuck with my game updates at 100 MB/s unless the 2.5Gb nics are used. So Windows still sucks.

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

What could you possibly be doing to need a quadnic? Also you won't be able to use a Quadnic. Especially if you are planning on teaming them together Windows 10 won't do it. To actually leverage NIC teaming you need Windows Server. So your loadbalanced link aggregation into your NAS will not work without NIC teaming otherwise you are going to have to contend with aggregation problems like MAC address conflicts.

I understand the drivers for the intel nics have the option to aggragate them..

Maybe the terminology is out with aggregation I mean multiple nics acting as one.
oh wait no support on windows 10 - so sad.
When did I claim it was for windows 10 anyway?
It is a dual boot with linux.


My NAS is an old machine with freenas installed. It works well. There are options to aggregate the NICs using that also.

As for any windows at all for any type of server - NO THANKS.


So the benefit for gaming are virtualisation options are available on freenas. My games are backed up there. Overnight updates are done to the backup through a caching server. It is straight forward to setup & use. It is on a virtualised ubunu server.
Game updates through steam can be fast.

Unfortunately I am stuck with my game updates at 100 MB/s unless the 2.5Gb nics are used. So Windows still sucks.

You are clueless.

[Lord Flashheart]

Oh sad it has come into a slagging match.

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

Messaggio originale di xSOSxHawkens:

... ffs man, are you just out to pick bones.

Nothing I said is in any way incorrect for consumer grade gear...

I'm referring to the person who originally posted. They ask utterly ridiculous questions about things they should ALREADY KNOW, then proceed to talk about what they will do, with no comprehension of how it even works.

For him to do "optical" as you called it he will need several SFPs with LC-Lucent cables(Most common) And if he wants to do Optical -> to Optical that will need a switch worth about $1200 Minimum. The UBNT 10G (EdgeSwitch 16 XG) 16 port optical switch comes to mind.

Bare in mind each SFP module could cost upwards of $100 - $200 (UBNT sell packs of 2 for this much) . You could use DAC - Direct Attach Copper however these are limited to very short lengths. As the frequency they operate in is well beyond that of conventional "Ethernet" Also
you need to be aware of another sticky concept in Fibre-optic communication MMF- Multimode Fibre or SMF- Single-Mode Fibre (One is significantly more expensive than the other) then you've also got to take into consideration if it's Fine-core fibre or Wide-core fibre same as MMF and SMF.

So you need to buy either SMF cable and SMF modules (Overkill for short distances)
or you buy MMF and MMF Modules (Most common for shorter less aggregation type networks)


I'm tired of explaining this to... naive individuals.

Well what the hell are you on about.


Step 1: get motherboard with two nics . Setup and install as usual and connect the 1GB to the switch as usual.

Step 2: put the 2.Gb/s nic into my freenas machine. Connect with appropriate cable between the the PC and the freenas machine. Setup basic networking on each with static IPs different from the main LAN on a different network. It is the most basic network between two machines. Minor setup & firewall access modifications. Access the NAS it through its new other local IP. Maybe modify a few of the virtual machines networking setups on the NAS to suit.

Step 3: Profit

It is not exactly rocket surgery with some basic networking knowledge.

Oh yay I can still use my sound card and get the speed access speed I want.

Time to leave the conversation completely. It is has just devolved into a slagging match.

[iceman1980]

Messaggio originale di Mamba Bajamba:

Oh sad it has come into a slagging match.

Messaggio originale di Product ∏:

I'm referring to the person who originally posted. They ask utterly ridiculous questions about things they should ALREADY KNOW, then proceed to talk about what they will do, with no comprehension of how it even works.

For him to do "optical" as you called it he will need several SFPs with LC-Lucent cables(Most common) And if he wants to do Optical -> to Optical that will need a switch worth about $1200 Minimum. The UBNT 10G (EdgeSwitch 16 XG) 16 port optical switch comes to mind.

Bare in mind each SFP module could cost upwards of $100 - $200 (UBNT sell packs of 2 for this much) . You could use DAC - Direct Attach Copper however these are limited to very short lengths. As the frequency they operate in is well beyond that of conventional "Ethernet" Also
you need to be aware of another sticky concept in Fibre-optic communication MMF- Multimode Fibre or SMF- Single-Mode Fibre (One is significantly more expensive than the other) then you've also got to take into consideration if it's Fine-core fibre or Wide-core fibre same as MMF and SMF.

So you need to buy either SMF cable and SMF modules (Overkill for short distances)
or you buy MMF and MMF Modules (Most common for shorter less aggregation type networks)


I'm tired of explaining this to... naive individuals.

Well what the hell are you on about.


Step 1: get motherboard with two nics . Setup and install as usual and connect the 1GB to the switch as usual.

Step 2: put the 2.Gb/s nic into my freenas machine. Connect with appropriate cable between the the PC and the freenas machine. Setup basic networking on each with static IPs different from the main LAN on a different network. It is the most basic network between two machines. Minor setup & firewall access modifications. Access the NAS it through its new other local IP. Maybe modify a few of the virtual machines networking setups on the NAS to suit.

Step 3: Profit

It is not exactly rocket surgery with some basic networking knowledge.

Oh yay I can still use my sound card and get the speed access speed I want.

Time to leave the conversation completely. It is has just devolved into a slagging match.

Oh yay I can still use my sound card and get the speed access speed I want.

This statement right here proves you are absolutely 100% clueless. And IF you had any clue about networking you would be using VLANs. Not Layer-3 routed networking, instead Trunked VLAN tags.