How to get the most out of Integrated sound cards in recent boards?

The weakest link in any audio system is the speakers. You can have the best audio hardware around but if the speakers or headphones are poor, the sound will be poor. Same way with the audio source, if its MP3's they are "something less than full fidelity".

I have a recording studio, with high end audio equipment and speakers. But for PC sound, I use the RealTek that is on my motherboard and a 2.1 Philips speaker system. For my purposes it is all that I need. The sound from my PC is much better than the sound from my iPhone5.

FLAC is a compressed format that is supposed to be better than MP3's. If you want to use MP3's use a higher bitrate and it will be better fidelity. Otherwise, the full fidelity wav files should be used. 44.1Khz/16 bit wav files are "CD Quality" and what is used on all commercial audio CD's.

I have three systems with RealTek audio, one with an AS Rock Z77 Fatal1ty motherboard, another with a Gigabyte Z77X UD5H motherboard and another with an ASUS Z77 LE Plus. All three are equal in sound quality. They also come with SoundBlaster MB software which is an "enhancement" to the on-board sound chip but I haven't found a need for that.

I rip my CDs to mp3 at an insane 320 kbps bit rate. I can just barely hear the difference between that and 128 kbps on a fairly decent sound system and that's only when I do a direct comparison. I can't tell the difference between 320 kbps and the original CD.

FLAC is lossless but I prefer mp3 because more players can play it, such as the one in my truck, and they can be tagged with track name, etc. (the original wav files cannot). The tags facilitate searching in the better players. I still have my original CDs but I'm giving serious consideration to reripping them to the original wavs just so I can have them handy should I ever want to use a different compression format. As huge as the files are, they still will take up far less room than the CDs themselves and the storage cases I keep them in (the original jewel boxes took up WAY too much room) so I can get rid of the CDs and cases. CDs in file form can be easily backed up so the danger of loss is less. I still haven't decided if I want to take an ISO I can mount with a virtual optical drive or just copy the files over.

5.1 and 7.1 are great for movies and gaming since the newer ones have the necessary channels already included. They are vastly overrated for just listening to music. In a movie or a game, action can be going on all around you. Music is normally performed on a stage in front of you so 2.1 is plenty for listening to music. 2.1 has the added advantage of being less critical for speaker placement and requiring less room for placing the speakers, something that becomes a huge issue in smaller listening areas.

About the only advantage 5.1 and 7.1 might have for listening to music is reverb would be a tiny bit more realistic since the echoes would be coming from behind you and from the sides in a higher quality system. Most people won't hear that difference anyway. A good 2.1 system will usually sound much better than a similarly priced 5.1 or 7.1 system when listening to music.

CDs and vinyl have only two channels to begin with. Any sound system with more than two channels has to create the extra channels from those two channels. Since bass is pretty much non-directional, a single sub will usually sound just as good as having a separate sub for each channel.

As far as mp3s go, as long as they were ripped at a high enough bit rate, they can sound just fine but there are better compression standards that aren't lossy like mp3s are, such as FLAC and AAC. Right now, mp3 is the most universally used compression standard by all music players although FLAC and ACC are catching up, especially ACC. Any mp3s you download are most likely to be compressed at lower bitrates to get greater compression. That's on of the reasons I quit downloading mp3s unless it's the only thing I can find (bad or no tagging is the other reason. Besides getting better quality from CDs, CDs include the liner notes that usually have more information that usually is more accurate than most downloaded mp3 tags (not always, though; I recently received a Christmas CD of Celtic Woman that showed 11 songs being traditional when, in fact, I found only one actually was once I researched each song).

One comment on MP3 compression. Whatever the MP3 is at, for example 128Kb/sec, you can't recover the fidelity by converting it to a higher bitrate. If you convert it to a wav file it will still be whatever fidelity it was with the MP3.

I have a (home) recording studio. The number of bits and frequency is another gray area. I record at 24 bits/44.1Khz (48Khz is for synchronization with video). I only record at 24 bits as that gives me more latitude for audio processing. However, at the end when I mixdown and "master" the final wav file is converted to 16 bits/44.1Khz, "Redbook/CD" standard. I see options for other bits (32 bits) and bitrates such as 96Khz but all that really does is produce a larger file size.

fireberd said:

One comment on MP3 compression. Whatever the MP3 is at, for example 128Kb/sec, you can't recover the fidelity by converting it to a higher bitrate. If you convert it to a wav file it will still be whatever fidelity it was with the MP3...

That's why I rip my CDs to an insane bit rate; to maintain as much fidelity as possible yet still have a much smaller file to put into portable players of finite capacity (I can put up to five hours of high quality music on a CD for my truck's 6 CD changer). I'm strongly considering ripping my CDs to wav files (or make ISOs of the CDs; I haven't decided yet) as a hedge against changes in future compression standards since I will eventually be getting rid of the physical CDs.