kind of pathetic sounding
I've occasionally noticed that my "new" computer (now 1.5 yrs old) is somewhat quirky about playing sound. I use the onboard sound chip, which actually sounds fine. It is a Realtek ALC850 and it uses a connector module that is insulated from the motherboard which reduces interference.
The problem is that I could only play one sound at a time. This would get really frustrating because something would have the audio device locked and then I would try to play a song or a movie and I just wouldn't get any sound. I finally got sick of bumping into this problem so I did some research to figure out what the heck was going on.
The conclusion? Simple! This POS does not have a hardware sound mixer! In windows, I assume the mixing for this thing is done in software by default once you install the driver, so one might not ever realize there is no hw mixer. I could setup software mixing in linux, but why would I want to increase the load on my cpu for that? Especially when I have several old SoundBlaster Live!'s sitting around.
So I grabbed an SBLive and stuck it in, disabled the onboard sound and rebooted. Voila. I had had the foresight to include the emu10k1 modules when I setup my system-- just in case-- so once the system came back up I instantly had sound that worked with multiple streams playing at once.
I'm really happy to have easily solved that problem, but damn is this pathetic! I had avoided onboard sound modules for years, but I figured by now they would be pretty decent. Nope, even on a higher-end motherboard cost-cutting has taken precedence over performance and quality. The SBLive that I purchased EIGHT years ago handily outperforms the onboard sound of my still newish computer. I've read that the nvidia nforce 1 and 2 actually included a nice sound chip, with hw mixer, but it was axed starting with nforce 3 to cut costs.
No wonder new computers often don't feel as fast as they should. The manufacturers assume that because you have a faster cpu they can eliminate chips designed/optimized for a certain task and simply offload that work to the cpu in software.
