Reply 20 of 178, by MaxWar
- Rank
- Oldbie
The story of the AMP enable Jumper.
Ok just a little post/story/update before its time for bed.
So I was revisiting the cards i had already recorded to get some Monkey island goodness and redo the Descent song to fix the potential L/R balance issue caused by the Normalize effect in my older audacity. When i suddenly hit that AV310 audioexcel.
For those not familiar with this card there is an excellent review of it done by none other than Gerwin on this very Forum.
Sound Blaster 16 Clones
This card certainly has alot of qualities, but according to my first recording session, I found it had possibly the worst output quality of all the cards so far. Its somewhat noisy but not too bad, however everything sounds muffled and muddy compared to most other cards.
However i realized i had not deactivated the internal amp with the jumpers on the card! '' D'Oh!! " So i thought that maybe bypassing that amp would allow the pristine audio goodness to shine through and that suddenly it would sound good!
Well, lo and behold, It didn't change anything!! The card sounds just as bad as ever. I compared the two different recordings ( amp vs no amp ) and really its pretty much identical. So identical that I even wonder if it actually did something with the card. I guess ill have to compare the output level directly with each jumper setting to make sure.
Where i may be going with all this is that, while i would recommend the onboard amp always be deactivated if possible. It might just not be all that significant in most circumstances.
By contrast, the card I think has the best FM output so far is also the one with the strongest onboard Amp. The Amazing ATI stereo F/X with its 8 watt of maximum output and un-bypassable amp that can clip your recording input trough the ceiling if not watched.
All this being said I would still bypass onboard amps whenever possible.
FM sound card comparison on a Grand Scale!!
The Grand OPL3 Comparison Run.