It's only $45/54 on Amazon (PCI/PCIe) so you could go the buy and try route and return if you weren't impressed by it. Reviews seem good, main complaints seem to be card failures/DOA cards but other than that look good. Might depend on that particular store either having one on display or having an OB one on hand (where it's already an open-box product so they don't have to break the seal on a new one) they could pop in a machine and have you take a listen. Even then you may still be disappointed.Īs for where to go to test things out, CC might oblige. Many motherboards offer higher-end audio features but it's not until you get into the high-end boards that you might get some appreciable difference. Many boards these days have improved on this though, so be grateful it's not 10 years ago, lol. on the board along with poor audio filtering/shielding, and circuit paths that aren't really too great. Most motherboards have really cheap caps, op-amps, etc. The Realtek audio being bad is less down to the Realtek chip and more up to the components used on the motherboard. Amazing that onboard audio still sucks for music, so I guess I'm just wondering whether someone would know if the ASUS Xonar DG 5.1 would be an improvement on my 15 year old Sound Blaster, roughly the same, or if it's just an add-on card that offers similar performance to Realtek?Īlso, any good deals on it that someone knows about? Looking to obviously spend as little as possible (since I remember spending about $45 on my 15 year old sound card back in the day, lol). I'm not an audiophile or anything, but I also like to get good sound quality out of my music, and felt my 15 year old sound card had very nice sound quality for my use. I guess to filter opinions out, the question goes to those who also agree that Realtek output is really bad for music on headphones. Wondering if anyone is using it and what they think, for music specifically.

Unlike my Sound Blaster, where all the notes are crisp and distinguishable, this is just a blurry mess, and there is a lot of noise in the music as well.įroun the sounds of it, the ASUS Xonar DG 5.1 is much better than Realtek Onboard.

I've tried to use the Realtek onboard that came with my motherboard from 2016, but it's really bad sound quality for music on headphones. Hi Guys, I've been using a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value that I bought a long time ago, and it now crackles whenever I try to use the analog output jack with my Sennheiser HD280 Pro.

Realtek alc1150 vs alc887