PC Sound Cards

Hey Guys.

My Nad C541i CD player has bust and although it is still within warranty and is currently being repaired, it has got me wondering whether a PC based hifi system might be the way to go after all. I have been looking around but am a bit puzzled about what card would give me an improvement over the Nad i currently have.

I have seen the M-audio Audiophile card advertised at £59.50 and was wondering what sort of sound that will give me compared to the Nad i currently have?

Any other suggestions would of course be very welcome.

Cheers guys

 

Hi
I'm using that card in my HCPC into a Audio Innovations 500 with B&W CDM9 NT's with good results.I rip the CD's onto a server with a program called EAC and the results are pretty close to my Roksan T/T.
The M-Audio is really the first step,other cards to look out for are the RME,specifically Digi 96/8 PAD and the HDSP 9632,which I'm soon upgrading to.
The AVforum and AVS forum are pretty good,a guy called Branxx has done some extensive testing on high end cards.
A conclusion might be a well setup PC with a decent soundcard would trounce a middle of the road CD player. :JPS:

 

To be honest, there was a lot of hype about the PAD 96/8 when it came out, but then the criticisms came - apparently bright and grainy sounding, analytical. HDSP will be a different kettle but its a bit more expensive.

Truth be told, I cant speak for the Audiophile, but I see no reason why it should not be at least as good as the NAD, maybe better. I use the EWX 2496 which shares the same DAC as the M-Audio but has a different output stage, but my EWX sounds better to me than my old Cambridge DAC3 and also the NAD 521, and Rotel RCD-971 I listened to. I'd say it was probably at least as good as an RCD-02, which is a £400 player. For £60, I'd say you cant go far wrong to be honest.

 

Cheers guys. Think im gonna go for the M-Audio. Not too clever with computers though so i hope its relativly easy to set up. Am currently using Fooba to play MP3's so will this be ok to use with the uncompressed wav files or is there better software out there?

 

Why not pm Julian2002 think he takes digi output from comp and processes with a dac.

 

Saddam,

I use an M Audio Firewire thingumygig that has similar Dac circuitry and find it highly musical.

 

If he uses it it must be easy to set up

 

Yes it will be easy to set up. I think you'd be happy with it if its as good as the EWX (which it pretty much should be) as I find they have a very musical sounding DAC as opposed to many cards which can often be a bit more detailed but analytical and dry.

 

I want a pair of the little M-Audio Studiophile DX4monitors for my PC or maybe to hook up to my DVD player.

 

I would personally be inclined to use an optical output from the pc soundcard into an external DAC in order to give RF isolation between the components. No complete PC actually complies to FCC or CISPR regulations on EMC, producing vast amounts of interference.

 

I cant hear any inteference, so although you may be right that it doesnt comply, it doesnt seem to make any difference that I can hear.

 

I use an optical connection between my PC and the DAC, because it's the only digital connection on the card. However, I do have a noisy (P/S and CPU fans) PC and keeping it away from the DAC, amp and myself by using long leads helps to minimise the nuisance. I'm using 10m optical leads at the moment without any problems. I'm not sure whether 10m copper leads would be as tolerant of interference.

 

Hi Saddam
If you are using Foobar2000,download the Kernel Streaming output plugin,this will bypass the Windows Kmixer which degrades the sound quality.
Regards
Rob

 

I really dont have the sort of money to be throwing at Hifi anymore to be honest. If it is on par with my NAD then great, if its better then its a bonus. Its on order anyway, £65 with delivery from piedog.com, hopefully a bargain awaits :JPS:

 

You wouldn't be able to hear it as such, rather it would give a lower quality of sound from the DAC...

 

Surely that depends on the DAC? Certainly the analogue out of my EWX was far better than my old Cambridge DAC3.

 

Of course. Not sure what you had in mind, but I wasn't thinking of noise directly coupled to the analogue outs, but rather the efect the noise would have on the clock in the DAC, and induced jitter affecting the resultant sound. There's MUCH more to all this though, WAY above my feeble knowledge.

 

The only thing I had in mind is a particular "artifact" that might be caused by using a soundcard, but you have to remember that even though the PC environment is not friendly to this on paper, the manufacturers will have tried their best to make sure its not too badly affected, and as I say I cannot hear any "artifact" or anything really wrong with the sound.

 

I was messing about with my current soundcard that came with the PC (£10 rubbish i presume) through my Arcam amp and heard lots of popping and clipping. Presumably this is down to the poor quality of card and the new M-audio wont suffer from this?

 

I hope not.