Sound card or no?

2013-06-05 02:05:46

Hi - I'm currently going from the digital out of my E-mu 0404 PCI sound card to my DAC in my home theater system. I'm also using the analog out of the sound card to my computer speakers. I'm using WASAPI with Foobar, Windows 7.

Since I don't really care about the sound quality from the PC speakers, would I be better off using the digital and analog outs from the motherboard's onboard sound? I would eliminate the step of going to the sound card, and with WASAPI it should still bypass all the Windows stuff.

Thoughts? Thanks!

Sound card or no?

Reply #1 – 2013-06-05 06:44:14

That sound card ought to be transparent when driving amplified speakers (although maybe not headphones).  Is there some reason you don't want to use it?  If not, I would just use it and be not worry about it.

Sound card or no?

Reply #2 – 2013-06-05 07:33:23

If you hook your speakers up to the onboard sound instead of the E-mu, you're not really "eliminating a step", it's just using the on-board hardware in place of your separate card.

I see no reason to change it unless you have special considerations - maybe one has more outputs available, your OS makes it easier to run different streams to different cards, something like that.

Sound card or no?

Reply #3 – 2013-06-05 16:33:33

No need to change anything unless you want to get rid of the sound-card out of the computer for some reason. The soundcard analog out is going to be better quality than the onboard sound, so if you've got it why not use it?

If you don't want to use the onboard sound you can disable it in bios if you want.

If you do want to use the onboard sound you can remove the Emu 0404 card if you want. Though I don't know why you'd want to do this.