Importance of Sound Card

[Mister Vertigo]

Hello all! I'm brand new to this forum, and I'm working on building my first GB-PVR box. I have just a couple hardware related questions.

First, how important is the sound card in the PC in regards to the audio quality of live TV and recordings? The PC I have only has two PCI slots and on-board audio. My tuner card is in one slot and I have to use the other for video right now until I can afford a video card for the PCI-Express slot. Am I going to be missing out on anything as far as sound by using the on-board audio?

Secondly, how important is the video card? Like I said above, I'm just using a PCI video card now for the S-Video out. The rest of the PC is pretty good with a 3.4 GHz P4 processor and 2 GB of memory.

What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance!

[elite]

Welcome to the board!

First, how important is the sound card in the PC in regards to the audio quality of live TV and recordings? The PC I have only has two PCI slots and on-board audio. My tuner card is in one slot and I have to use the other for video right now until I can afford a video card for the PCI-Express slot. Am I going to be missing out on anything as far as sound by using the on-board audio?

You should be fine with the on board audio

Secondly, how important is the video card? Like I said above, I'm just using a PCI video card now for the S-Video out. The rest of the PC is pretty good with a 3.4 GHz P4 processor and 2 GB of memory.

PC specs look good

The video card is much more important and seems to raise many more issues. If you are not planning on playing games etc you should be able to save some cash there - Before you purchase make sure you have a search on here to see if there are any known issues....

[SickBoy]

Some mb's have really, really poopy onboard audio (likely a crappily written driver issue) that jacks up your cpu utilization. I suppose the only way you can find out is via trial and error though. I used to use a SB Live Value card, until I upgraded my whole system with a new MB that has the ubiquitous onboard audio. Haven't had any problems so I call myself lucky and let it be.

w.r.t. video cards, I ran into a hangup with DX9 support for HDTV signals. I had a card that didn't do DX9 in hardware (GF4 Ti4600) - while it was a very powerful card (moreso in its day than now), it wasn't adequate for HD. I replaced it with a $40 FX5200 card which solved my HDTV issues. Don't ask me why, I still believe the Ti4600 to be more powerful for most applications, but in this case, I'm not using those apps on this PC. So be aware of the system requirements of the video software you're trying to run. Most modern cards should do just fine (my Ti4600 was/is outside of the 3-yr "obsolete" life of PC components).

[stefan]

If the audio turns out to be an issue, there are always usb-soundcards. Then you're not limited by the pci slots.

[blizard]

Hello all! I'm brand new to this forum, and I'm working on building my first GB-PVR box. I have just a couple hardware related questions.

First, how important is the sound card in the PC in regards to the audio quality of live TV and recordings? The PC I have only has two PCI slots and on-board audio. My tuner card is in one slot and I have to use the other for video right now until I can afford a video card for the PCI-Express slot. Am I going to be missing out on anything as far as sound by using the on-board audio?

Secondly, how important is the video card? Like I said above, I'm just using a PCI video card now for the S-Video out. The rest of the PC is pretty good with a 3.4 GHz P4 processor and 2 GB of memory.

What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance!

To answer such question without making too wild guesses we would need to know more exactly what sound codec that are onboard and what hardware you have. You can use directX diagnostic tool to find out that by go to (windows) start on desktop, open "run..." and type DxDiag as command. This will run a diagnostic and let you know what have been installed for codec and driver related to your hardware.

If you use or plan to use Vista for your sound in the future you should know that Vista have changed how Windows Vista will use hardware support for sound.

Your sound will also depend on how good your speaker are and for what kind of connection you will use. Is it based on S/PDIF or analogue? Is it stereo or 5.1 (multi channel) sound you want? What kind of sound are your TV tuner card producing?

It would help to know what motherboard you have and/or chipset in most cases to find out what kind of onboard sound you have. Brand of TV tuner card and how you want to connect it with speaker.

[flyswatta]

I use onboard audio no problem, you should probably just try it and see how you like it. As for video, if you're doing standard definition video, then the video requirements aren't so high - I use a RagePro32 (circa 2000 - 32MB RAM!!! Smokin' ) and it works great - it even works fine for divx. I had an nVidea GeForce mx440 but I could never get the color saturation to normal (drove me nuts).

From what I hear where you really need the video power is with HD.

Personally, I'd just try the onboard audio and video card that you already have. If you're doing SD, then most likely the problems you encounter won't be hardware related, they'll be software.

[Mister Vertigo]

Wow! Thank you all for the responses! It sounds like I'll be OK with my onboard audio. My home entertainment center only has two speakers right now connected through my receiver, so I should be OK for now. I know that in the future if I upgrade to 5.1 I'll have to upgrade my sound. Stefan is right, I can get USB audio. I forgot about that.

My system is a Dell that I got from work. I don't plan on playing any games or anything with this. It's going to sit in my entertainment center and be used to watch/record TV and play DVDs. Maybe someday I can get a PCI Express video card and I can use the other PCI slot for another tuner. I have the Hauppauge HVR-1600 right now. I ordered a PVR-150, but I was one of those that got these instead. I'm not using the HDTV tuner on it, just the analog. It seems to be working well so far!

Anyways, thank you all for the advice. I'm sure I'll be back here with more questions in the future!