Realtek Alc1150 Vs Realtek Alc887
Said by: I have an ASUS mobo also. I just use the onboard audio. I watch some movies and listen to some music. For me it works fine with a 2-0 speaker setup. If you're really into music and have 5-1 or 7-1 speaker systems then you probably would want an audio card. I don't have any odd sounds coming from mine, but it sounds like you don't have a solid connection somewhere.
I am no audioholic, but my current Realtek® ALC887 on my old P8Z77-M is very bad together with my Sennheiser HD558. I do not want to buy a dedicated soundcard if the. While mobos like the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 are equipped with the ALC1150, other. More about difference audio codecs alc887 892 alc1150. Realtek ALC1150 audio.
I have RealTek audio (ALC888S chipset, assuming that's onboard audio) on my HTPC set up with an A/V receiver (via HDMI) for 5.1 sound and rocks. To readers: rectified the OP's issue. The problem in question has to do with how PC hardware actually works at a very low level, and it's virtually impossible for any end-user to diagnose this reliably (in turn they choose to start spouting off nonsense on forums, saying things like 'I removed my Big Dog Snake USB/CF card and now everything is great!'
Event timers are driven by a series of dedicated chips which have different degrees of accuracy and latency (ex. ACPI timers vs. All of these are affected in some way or another by certain universal. SpeedStep adjusts the CPU clock rate, which has a direct effect on event timers as well as a multitude of other things - many things that require/rely on a stable/set/constant rate of occurrence (sound/audio is the biggest one) get affected by this. Some drivers handle this better than others, and some hardware handles this better than others.
Likewise, other CPU features like C3/C6 P-states can cause fluctuations in these rates, resulting in the above. The more 'power-saving' features get added to hardware (regardless of where - at the CPU level, at the bus/protocol level, or anywhere else), the more fluctuation there tends to be when it comes to event timers as well as interrupt rates.
The applications (that also means drivers) have to be written to handle these situations cleanly/correctly - many don't. For example, where I got into a lengthy discussion with a NES emulator author about his choices to force-disable some of these power-saving features citing 'audio latency issues'. He provided responsiveness graphs which I also questioned. After pushing him for a while, he dug through his code and found that the root cause was actually a design flaw and upon fixing it there was no need to force-disable the power-saving features.
Realtek Alc887 Codec
I rest my case. Realtek in general has a very well and long-established history of making (generally speaking) crap. Their audio ICs and NICs tend to be sub-par, ditto with their drivers. I've ranted about Realtek NICs on my blog in the past (use Google to find it). The reason Realtek is everywhere is because their ICs are cheap, thus allowing the board manufacturers to make a larger profit. For example on all Realtek audio drivers that I've used (ALC887 and ALC889), there is a downright 100% repeatable bug pertaining to frequency playback rates when using non-DirectX for audio that is 22kHz or lower - the playback frequency table is wrong (audio plays back at a slightly lower frequency than it should).
Realtek Alc1150 Vs Realtek Alc892
I also tend to avoid VIA anything (CPUs, ICs, whatever - doesn't matter what) given their years and years of horrible, horrible chip bugs and driver bugs. Anyone who remembers the VIA 4-in-1 drivers and the 686B will know what I'm talking about. Sadly I've tried add-on audio cards that have their own series of horrible bugs too - I've found just as awful bugs in Asus' Xonar DG drivers, Creative Labs X-Fi drivers, and in M-Audio's Revolution drivers. I also tried some other brand (I forget the company name, I still have the card in some box) and found even different bugs. That's really all I have to say on the matter. I have a new Dell XPS 8500 desktop so not an ASUS motherboard. I have ALWAYS had a sound card on my computers until this one.
Dell was offering the ancient Creative X-Fi or a four week wait for the Recon3d. I love my X-Fi card (the original one not that fake one Dell sold later) on my XPS 600 desktop with XP Pro but did not want it or the Recon3d that gets bad reviews for my new XPS 8500. Dell was not offering Creative's new line of Z cards so I decided to see how just on board RealTek and Dell's Waves MaxxAudio would be. RealTek is HORRIBLE and while Waves MaxxAudio is better, BOTH can be used ONLY with two speakers! Msi burn recovery. I have an older setup of Altec Lansing Quadrophonic speakers with a huge subwoofer.
They sound great on XP with Creative X-Fi card but while Realtek tests indicates all four speakers are working properly, I get no sound at all when I play music or a video, etc. If I switch to two speaker I get horrible rubbish sound that is very weak volume wise. If I disable Realtek and use Waves MaxxAudio the sound is reasonably good but will only work with two speakers.
(Dell misled and advertised it would work with quad, 5.1, 7.1) but it is actually only for laptops with two speakers. I plan to purchase Creative's new Sound Blaster Z SBX PCIE Gaming Sound Card with Beamforming Microphone SB1500 soon. It gets excellent reviews. I think I fall in the category of 'Power User'.not much of a gamer at all.I like powerful desktops and like to run virtual machines. I think I got spoiled with W98 and a Yamaha sound card.that was a truly amazing little sound card. As far as purity of sound goes, it outperformed the Creative X-Fi on my XP machine.
Anyhow, I want a sound card for recording streaming music, listening to my own music files, having the sound for a movie be great.that sort of thing. The vast majority of reviews at NewEgg, Amazon, Hardforum, etc.are really good for the X series. Evidently, Creative, after several years of crap, has gotten its act together. Apparently, even the old cards like the X-Fi finally work good on Win 7 and 8 because of new drivers (which were not out when I bought this machine in November). Not sure why its named a 'gaming' card as that could limit its sales unnecessarily.
There are some spikes that I've experienced in terms of internal latencies that seems to indicate some issue that I can't seem to narrow down. Whether or not that's the cause of the small audio glitches that I'm experiencing, I have no idea. Do these glitches happen all the time? No, every so often I get them.
It kinda' just spoils what is generally a perfectly running system. Do I sound a bit too obsessed with the performance of this machine? I don't know. It's just that when you put as much money into the machine as I have you tend to want it to run as perfectly as you can.
Said by: I think I solved it! » This sounds very, very, very likely. Welcome to how PC hardware works, and why all this 'background crap' (like anti-virus software, malware scanners, etc. anything that causes an interrupt to be held high (stopped/halted) for a while, such as disk I/O) does nothing but destroy responsiveness of a system.
Welcome to what we system administrators have to deal with/troubleshoot as well. My comments on the quality of audio drivers (regardless of brand) still apply, however. It very simply is. I've yet to see a single onboard audio solution that could do anything beyond EAX 2 for games.
A codec that is very close to (if not already) 20 years old. And even for those that claim to do so (like I'd seen on some recent laptops), none of them would even have the software support to do stuff like ALchemy to be able to accelerate games that were still compiled with DirectSound in mind as opposed to OpenAL. And even on newer games that don't suffer from this API issue, you also have to contend with the fact that such onboard solutions usually don't support very many simultaneous audio channels, and as a result, you don't end up 'hearing' many things that you should be able to if you use a proper audio card. This is especially exacerbated on a true surround sound setup. I agree with what some people are saying. To truly understand the problem, you have to understand the hardware, timings, latency, etc. For myself, I tried using RealTek on-board audio, as well as several PCIe sound cards, including the Asus Xonar DX.
As I investigated sound hardware, and tried different things, I found I was slowly but surely getting higher quality audio with less noise, but something called DPC latency had the most dramatic effect on my ability to create pop and stutter-free audio while composing multi-track music using a variety of VST's and audio inputs from real instruments and synths. Once I understood audio technology more, I realized that on-board, and add-on soundcards were just crap, including the Asus Xonar DX which people seem to generally like.
I still own one of these cards, and use it on my son's PC, I prefer it over Real-Tek on-board audio, it truly is better. Asus's Xonar drivers are absolute junk. Incidentally, there is a great place to get more up-to-date drivers for these cards: » No surprise, Asus has not been helpful in the driver department. After much thought and research, I finally opted for a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 audio interface.
Realtek Alc1150 Vs Realtek Alc892
This is a very nice rack-mounted device which connects to the computer via Firewire, and offers a lot of inputs and outputs. It offers TRS and XLR balanced inputs/outputs, and a flexible mixer and flexible routing. Anything which I connect which uses unbalanced inputs/outputs get routed through a DI box first. This interface has 20 inputs + 20 outputs, enough for my current needs.
The biggest thing for me, was the fact that the noise floor was much lower with the Saffire Pro 40 than with other audio hardware contained within the PC chassis. I also completely lost the noise introduced by the various components of the computer (hard drive seeking, PCIe bus signalling, etc.). Since I drive my studio monitor speakers and subwoofer at near-full volume all the time (which they can easily handle), and simply pull the volume down using the Windows mixer, or Reaper DAW's mixer, using the Saffire Pro 40 means I never have to hear the crap the computer constantly introduces into lower-cost crap sound hardware.
The difference is measurable, and highly noticeable, even to the untrained ear. I investigated DPC latency and other issues surrounding the introduction of pops, hisses and stutter, which are not issues of audio hardware themselves, but are caused by more systemic issues - hard page faults, badly written drivers which hog resources, etc. Once I solved those issues, it was smooth sailing. Believe it or not, running a Windows 7 gadget that showed the multi-core CPU utilization totally killed my ability to produce music without stutter and pops. If you have the coin to spare, don't waste your time with internal sound hardware.
Go buy an external hardware audio interface, some decent active studio monitors (Behringer and Fostex make some good low-cost speakers), and XLR balanced cables, and make sure you have a firewire interface using the highly recommended Texas Instruments Firewire chipset. Make sure you keep your audio interface drivers up-to-date. Take the time to learn the technology, buy quality components, then tune your system to get the best audio performance. You won't be sorry. What's your background? Are you an audiophile/audio enthusiast, or professional musician?
While I 'm sure everything you claim about the Saffire Pro is true, recommending a component that is the cost for simply audio is going to fall outside the budget of the vast majority of PC users. The motherboard I bought, and some version even came with the external ThunderFX module. I opted against the version with the external module, and now I'm wondering if I shouldn't have. What would you recommend for people who are looking for better audio over integrated, but don't have $500 to put down on the Saffire Pro? Is there a decent middle ground for $100-150/200? Said by: What's your background?
Are you an audiophile/audio enthusiast, or professional musician? While I 'm sure everything you claim about the Saffire Pro is true, recommending a component that is the cost for simply audio is going to fall outside the budget of the vast majority of PC users. The motherboard I bought, and some version even came with the external ThunderFX module. I opted against the version with the external module, and now I'm wondering if I shouldn't have. What would you recommend for people who are looking for better audio over integrated, but don't have $500 to put down on the Saffire Pro? Is there a decent middle ground for $100-150/200?
I am an audiophile, and an aspiring musician. I've been down this street before, spending good money on hardware, only to be disappointed with the results, then upgrading to the next thing people recommend, only to be disappointed some more. In the long run, spending more money on cheap, low-end soundcards, than if I just bought one good professional audio interface.
The interface I purchased was pricey ($530 + tax at the time, can be found for $300 or less on the used market), but that's just one example. There are many lower-cost high-quality interfaces on the market, people just have to open their eyes, look around, read independent reviews, speak with people who are in the business of making music, you know, get back to old-fashioned research. I was turned on to Focusrite by a guy I've grown to trust at Long & McQuade, but I still had to read a lot, including reviews by professional musicians and recording studios before making my decision. The Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 for $299.99, can be found used for less. » » I usually focus on Focusrite Firewire audio interfaces, but there are also USB audio interfaces, and other companies that produce pro audio interfaces. Here's one more, the Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 USB audio interface » » I try to keep in mind that people are looking for a minimum of 5.1 audio, and require 6 ch output.
If people only want really good 2ch audio, more money can be saved. People think nothing of spending $150, $300, and recently up to $1000 per graphics card, $300 or more on SSD's, $200 on processors, and $150-$300 on PSU's. Big systems are still in-vogue where I live, and shelling out $500 for a pro audio interface doesn't really seem like much.
At the end of the day, when I crank my music, I'm not disappointed in the sound when the hard drive activity increases, and I don't hear all the horrible noises induced by the system. One of the other things people have to wrestle with is ground loops, causing 60 cycle hum (60hz in Canada + US + other places, 50hz in the UK + other places) in the audio path.
The presence of ground-loop induced hum certainly show inexperience. They are relatively easy to cure, once you understand it, but can be more challenging to diagnose as the number of connections you make increase. At the end of the day, hopefully people find this educational. There are some good soundcards out there, and I like to think of the Asus Xonar series as being right up there, but they will always be low-end crap that introduce far more noise than we'd like. Pro audio interfaces are of a higher echelon, and better match people's expectation for pristine audio.
It still requires a computer which is properly set up, and following the essential guidelines: disabling speedstep, getting a handle on DPC latency, and making sure your system is properly tuned up (current drivers, respectful drivers, fewer-to-zero resource hogs, etc.).
If anyone has a 5.1 or 7.1 audio system, and has a motherboard with Realtek soundcard, then you may know how it works. I have an Asus H170 Pro Gaming motherboard. It's a known issue that for the ALC 1150 codec (z170/h170) and older, the Speaker Fill or Virtual Surround does a very poor job when playing stereo sound (music, youtube). So I'm not talking about 6 channels. That works properly. So for stereo, the sound on the rear speakers and central is very low and distorted, and there's almost no bass either.
Even if the surround speakers are set to full-range, nothing changes. Either live with that, or remap all the jacks as Frontal in regedit. But that's not the best solution. Before, I had an Asus P5QL/EPU (2009) which has 8 channels, codec VIA VT1708S. And it worked perfect. When I select Speaker Fill, I hear the music perfectly on all speakers.
So I was really surprised that my new motherboard has this issue. I bought this MB because it has 6 audio jacks. Or else I would have bought a cheaper one with 3.
And a dedicated sound card. But I didn't know. I contacted Asus, they said that's just how the codec works. Now, the Z270 and H270 motherboards got released and they say it has better sound, but no really much details, just seeing it has the new ALC 1220 audio codec. So who got the new Z270 or H270 Motherboards, can you please tell me if you have perfect sound on all 6 speakers with Speaker Fill? Or is it still low and distorted.