Hi,
I am going to retire my AMD Duron 750 system (with onboard VIA AC 97 sound ) and treat myself to a completely new PC. So, the question of a soundcard arises. I haven't seen the HA recommendations (Chaintech AV 710 or Turtle Beach S.C.) in stores here in Germany. I only find Terratec and Creative Labs Soundblaster cards. The store where I want to buy my PC allows one to configure it with individual components and they put the whole thing together for 10 EUR. Since I want control over the components used but could never put everything together by myself, this seems the best solution for me.
Perhaps I should mention that I just want to listen to music (mostly encoded with Lame --preset standard) over my Sennheiser HD 600 headphones directly through the line-out of the soundcard, I don't need any special features for games or line-in recording. Just good stereo sound for listening to music
So here's my question: How are the current onboard sound solutions (Realtek seems to be most common) these days? Total crap or OK?
As for soundcards, I have the choice of "Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS" (~80 EUR), the "Soundblaster Live! 24 bit" for half the price of the Audigy and "Soundblaster Live! LS" for 25 EUR. Or what about a "Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space" for 80 EUR? Or a very cheap "Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI" for 20 EUR?
ATM I'm leaning towards the Audigy 2, but don't really need all those fancy features. Is the "SB Live 24 bit" worse just for listening to music?
Which one would you choose?

Thanks for your help!

Greetings, sTisTi

Audigies are designed for gaming and more than two channels, and they are often claimed to be very inferior sound quality. EMU cards are the most recommended. You have a headphone which is well regarded. A Waveterminal U24 should also do the trick and may allow you to listen away from the noise of the comptuer.

I'm sure that you could handle putting your system together by yourself, it really is much easier than you would think.

OK, then the only things you really have to worry about are soundcard upsampling and noise, some people will tell you that good DACs (digital to analogue converters) are very important but I would be willing to bet that as long as they are decent you would probably never hear a difference. Many soundcards (nearly all creative cards and onboard soundcards) can't play back audio at 44.1kHz, the sampling rate of audio CDs, they are only capable of playing back 48kHz audio, which is the standard sampling rate of the audio on video DVDs. Thus these soundcards have to convert the 44.1kHz audio to 48kHz audio. The SB Live was notorious for horrible upsampling and this sometimes (often?) created audible problems in playback. Newer SB cards aren't quite so bad but they still do upsample. To get around this problem you can upsample during playback with foobar2000's PPHS resampler, which still does lower sound quality (that is unavoidable while resampling) but will do a much better job than a soundcard would, to the point that the errors caused by upsampling will almost definitely be inaudible. As well as this cheaper soundcards and, especially, onboard soundcards tend to create a lot of background noise which can be annoying during very silent passages or between songs.

Between these cards, for simple 2-channel audio, such as music, the choice IMO is a no-brainer. The "Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI" is known for its high quality and doesn't resample like the creative cards. The difference in sound quality between this card and 7.1 Space is probably inaudible, I would only recommend the other card to those with 7.1 speaker setups or hardcore gamers. As far as the RealTek onboard card goes I'm not really sure, but the "Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI" is definitely way better.

-music_man

Thanks CSMR and music_man_mpc for your recommendations.
The EMU cards don't seem to be available here in Germany, I only found them in UK online stores so far. Anyway, they seem to be a bit on the expensive side for my purposes. Noise from the computer will hopefully not be a problem as I want to build my new PC with very silent components - my present PC is very noisy, so I really want to pay attention to this.
Your opinions really put me off the Audigy 2 LS. music_man, are you sure about the Terratec not upsampling? In the specs it says: "resolution: 16 bit/48 kHz" To be sure, I'm talking about this card. If this Terratec is OK in quality, I'd be happy to buy it and save the 60+ EUR that the inferior Audigy costs more.

Greetings, sTisTi

As I understand it Terratec is a trusted name around here and I would be surprised to hear that this card upsamples. I have been looking around on the net and on the Terratec website, along with many others it says that this card supports output sampling rates up to 48kHz. This seems to suggest that it supports lower sampling rates and 44.1 is almost certain to be among then if it does. Also it states, much more clearly, that it supports both 44.1 and 48kHz optical output. I wouldn't know if that is a sure sign that it supports 44.1kHz analogue output or not, but if your amp supports optical input this card would surely be a good bet. Someone here must know for sure whether this card upsamples or not, keep waiting and someone will probably give you a more definative answer.

edit: changed bold to italic, moer the effect I was looking for

You're really picking apart very fine differences here. The average person, even picky, won't hear much difference between most modern sound cards, whether on-board or dedicated, brand A, brand X, etc. That said, I have an M-Audiophile 2496 with expensive interconnects giving signal to my Headroom Home headphone amplifier, connected to Sennheiser HD 650 headphones. Call me crazy and hypocritical. My speakers are however powered by Asus on-board CMI audio or sometimes an Audigy2 ZS.

There should be a sticky for recommended soundcards.. It certainly would help the newbs like me

Is that what you find when you connect your headphone or amplifier straight to onboard sound? Not much difference?

Certainly, while using headphones, during very quiet passages and between songs there is a noise issue, and a rather annoying one I might add. However while music is playing at a reasonable volume (or higher) this still produces reasonable results (not sure if I could ABX between this and a good card). To be honest I have no complaints at all about using a crappy on-board card connected to a power amplifier and speakers, I really don't think I could ABX this against a "HiFi" CD Player, with the exeption of a slight increase in the noise floor, which IMO is perfectly tolerable. I would be more inclined to upgrade a soundcard simply for a potenial increase in quality (without having to eat up CPU cycles by resampling) and to get rid of the aforementioned annoying headphone problem. Personally I would never pay $100 for these slight improvements, but given the low cost of cards like the Chaintech AV 710, SB PCI 128 (if your lucky enough to find one used) or Terratec Aureon 5.1 I would recommend anyone interested in high quality sound from their PC to invest in one of these.

for a quick and slightly related question, I noticed the Chaintech having an optical out. Does sound card matter if you are using digital/optical out (i dont know why it would)?

You are saying that distortion isn't a problem for you, only noise? I find an obvious tonal difference between onboard sound and my sound card, and a noticeable but smaller difference in detail between my sound card and DAC. (My comparison is not perfect because my sound card has an op-amp after the line-out stage, unlike my DAC.)

be careful, someones gonna throw a TOS #8 at you...

True, but I don't care