I would start by eliminating other potential factors. Start off with nothing more than the cheapest mike you can find, plugged directly into your sound card, and see if you get all this horrible distortion you're referring to. You might also want to consider booting into a live Linux distribution (I like Knoppix) and see if you can duplicate the problem with whatever Linux sound-recording application is handy.

Or better yet, since you say everything sounds okay "when listening over headphones", just use whatever standard MP3 file you might have sitting around and see if that can withstand being "compressed and sent over a stream" (whatever that entails).

Severe quality problems like those sound very much like software configuration issues.

i have always felt that older sound equipment is better then the new stuff in the market. i remeber in the 90's you can go pick up a standard Hi-Fi stereo and when you look at the back, there were ports for RCA inputs. Today however the standard Hi-Fi have no AUX inputs. Everything is bluetooth or WiFi. Dr Dre the guy who designed Beats Headphones, said over the years sound equipment has degraded in quality because the rise of MP3's.

Today everyone is listening to cheap compressed audio formats 128kbs crap, so the companies dont bother with producing quality gear unless its for studio stuff.
i still find it amazing my Sound Blaster Live Value has far superior sound quality and volume, then the inbuilt Sound Card in my Z87X-OC MotherBoard

Judging by the sound quality of his products, Dr. Dre wouldn't know good audio engineering if it bit him in the ass. Take his opinion on anything (except enriching yourself on the backs of the uninformed) with a salt lick.

Yeah, some Creative/E-MU sound cards had really good quality converters in the early 2000's, no sub-$1000 pro stuff seems to reach anymore. But there's no way you'll hear any significant difference unless you're looping multiple times or something.

gdjacobs wrote:

Judging by the sound quality of his products, Dr. Dre wouldn't know good audio engineering if it bit him in the ass. Take his opinion on anything (except enriching yourself on the backs of the uninformed) with a salt lick.

i am not saying that beats are good quality products, but that statement about poor quality audio devices in the markey is 100% true.

JaKSLaP wrote:

i have always felt that older sound equipment is better then the new stuff in the market.

Yes, well, some people "feel" that everything just sounds so much better after they spend a few hundred dollars on cables. 😜

Today however the standard Hi-Fi have no AUX inputs. Everything is bluetooth or WiFi.

No, that would be a pretty fancy "Hi-Fi", I think.

Today everyone is listening to cheap compressed audio formats 128kbs crap

Maybe ten years ago, but lossless audio is all the rage nowadays.

I don't know, most people I know can't be bothered dragging their albums out even if they're stored digitally and just dial them up on YouTube. Therefore they'll be listening at whatever bit-rate the video is in or their internet can handle - for me, that's about 64-96Kbps because I'm limited to 240p most of the time. Though I prefer to listen to Vinyl, CD or Tape when I want to listen properly and not just have it on as a background noise.

Whilst I'm here, I find older Hi Fi gear indeed does sound better, at least, with the music I want to listen to. I have yet to find another stereo which I personally like the sound of as much as my ageing Sanyo, my similarly aged Rotel amp is a close second though. The almost brand new Panasonic I have is supposedly twice as powerful, yet doesn't go as loud and sounds crappy when listening to death metal or classical music... Oddly, it seems it might sound marginally better in modern pop, but I don't like that music and therefore don't care and went back to the Sanyo pretty fast.

Modern sound cards are shit. The worst are the so-called Studio cards featuring the exact same chip and sometimes same board as the £5 solutions available in whitebox. Yeah, Envy24, that sure is a pro audio solution, especially when you've somehow wired the Mic interface up as a MIDI OUT port (WTF? No joke, I had one that did this!) and used the worst components you could before billing me £150. Pinnacle actually sold a very similar card for OVER £800 and it had less capabilities than the regular £10 offering from Maplin as well as requiring proprietary add-ons before you could use it at all, I have two I got out of the trash some years ago and may find them when moving, if I do, I'll show them here. Then there's the CMI9739 ones which are much of the same, and whatever Creative Labs do now, pretty sure they're phasing out the EMU10KAMILLION or whatever and just using that same shitty Realtek codec your motherboard probably uses but with a crappy plastic casing over it.

That's the worst thing, they clearly KNOW that they're selling you shit because they always put labels and other crap over the chips or leave blatant sandpaper marks behind where they've taken off the silkscreen. Some companies even pay to have their own silkscreen put on, notably Philips. I bought a PSC605 for £70 years ago to replace a CMI8738... Much like my M-Audio to replace an Envy24, this was evidently pointless as the card just worked on my existing driver. The difference being, M-Audio used a sticker, Philips actually had their own print put on top of the CMI8738. The board used the exact same layout as the larger Mercury version of the card as well as the Pine version, albiet the Pine version had a red PCB, guess it must have been a reference design from C-Media or something and lots of people used it. Sounded shit though, it distorts a little at high volume and the software is bloated and slow, the Mercury card didn't distort and even if it did, I'd care much less because it was dirt cheap at about £9.99 from Quay Tec. I still have the Philips card in its box, I'd post a photo but my camera is not working.

Edit: My typing is crap today. Hopefully this is the last edit I have to make!

A pile of crap/shit is still the same thing, even after it had it's surface polished.
Modern soundcards is like the same thing as ISDN cards here, totally useless.

JaKSLaP wrote:

i am not saying that beats are good quality products, but that statement about poor quality audio devices in the markey is 100% true.

You could certainly get poor quality products back then. Most will have been long since tossed in the bin. You can definitely get good quality products now. Sony, Yamaha, Pioneer, Denon, etc. The key as with most things in this day in age is to research your purchase thoroughly.

Dre was probably dumping on the MP3 format so he could push his own music streaming service. MP3 with a good encoder and >160kbps (varies on how golden your ear is) quickly becomes indistinguishable from CD audio. It's definitely not as efficient as newer formats, so lower bit rate files tend to fall apart in terms of quality.

On the topic of audio, I agree that many manufacturers have been pushed out of the market. In terms of discrete card chipsets, it's pretty well down to Creative and CMI. Again, before purchasing you want to gather as much information about the product as possible.