On PC multimedia

So lucky me, I bought a soundcard (not really lucky, I spent $100 on it)

It's the one CNET said it's like, the best consumer sound card that you can afford (let's not include those that cost like, a $1000). I wasn't wrong when I bought it, but I'm not very satisfied with it.

Sure, It's a good card. The sound is great, the drivers are good. It's PCIe so I don't have to worry about future upgrades (thank you Intel for making this happen... albeit too late). Has ASIO out of the box, and the driver download was a few clicks in Chrome or a browser-of-your-choice.

So what's wrong, huh? Nothing really.

It's a Certain-Taiwanese-Company's Certain-Implementation of the CMedia Oxygen HD Sound chip. Sounds familiar ^^. It's that card...

BUT WAIT :)

Cons. Or what I call "the fun part" :). I'll be formal and objective here, so let's avoid Fanboyism.

• Takes a floppy power supply. Not really a con here, but my cables got messed up in the case -.-
• It doesn't work in Lion (yes, I have a Hackintosh, check my twitter. But more on that later)
• It works in Linux. Works-ish, I had to waste my 5 Mbit Internet connection to get myself some PulseAudio control centers to fix Right Channel balance. Screw balance. I want to stream Youtube. It's multimedia. Damn.
• The sound quality is not as good as it should be. It's better than the ALC888 on my board, but It's not THAT better. Perhaps it's the speakers... so no major placebo effect here.
• I don't have $100 anymore. Could have bought me some decent shoes... Or go to Zagreb and back...by plane.

I'm not cheap, but really. Give me something better for the price.

And since I started exploring iOS development on my Crackintosh, I cannot play music or movies, or relax, take a break. No sound you see.

But me being smart (well, you have to see that in person), I had a Bluetooth USB dongle and connected the Bluetooth headset... the sound is awful, but at least it sounds. Also, the onboard chip doesn't really work good on a Crack-a-Mac, so basically I don't have ANY sound on speakers. And that's OK.

Boring mute Macrack. That actually annoys me most.

So after this rant, I played some music on my $100 soundcard using $150 speakers. Did I get motivation from the music? No. So that value's also gone. So what's with the extra power that the sound card needs to have?

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The moral of the story: If you want better sound on your PC, it's not just buying the soundcard. It's arranging your room that has the PC (so you can normally position the speakers), then buying good Hi-Fi speakers and THEN buying the soundcard to fit all those needs. The soundcard with which you can calibrate the output, set up the equalizer and do other Hi-Fi Voodoo and Mumbo-Jumbo.

Hi-Fi's overrated. For the most part.

I really just want some value for the price. And that's OK.