It's rarely necessary to recap soundcards - I say use it as is. Unless the card sounds bad or there's visible capacitor damage.

Xonar DG should provide better quality output, but I don't know how noticeable it will be. The DG also has a headphone amplifier, which could make a difference in quality as well, especially if you connect headphones directly to your sound card.

I guess it comes down to if the Audigy has any special hardware sound features (EAX 3.0 is basically it) that you're going to make use of. Personally, I used a ton of sound cards through the 1999-2005 era and was never all that pleased with environmental effects, aside from Aureal's A3D 2.0, so I don't think you'll be missing much with the Xonar's slightly more limited EAX support. Even the X-Fi with EAX 5.0 Advance HD or whatever it was called didn't make any impression on me whatsoever.

As for capacitors, I wouldn't bother.

I think someone with some good capacitance measuring equipment should test caps from various pieces of hardware, from different eras to see if there is any legitimacy to the "recap everything" philosophy that has spread across the internet (likely starting in an audiophile community). Caps from the capacitor-plague-era, clearly defective caps, caps in circuits with other defective caps, devices with obvious problems, caps that are known to have problems, devices that are 40-50 years old... I can understand. But preemptively recapping entire boards with no measurable change in performance or reliability seems like an unnecessary risk to the equipment in question, at least for most of us mere mortals that can't recap an entire board perfectly in 15 minutes.

Thanks for the answers!

I am trying the Xonar DG on Linux and it sounds quiet powerful and nice even if maybe not time correct. I will try also the Audigy and let you know.

386SX wrote:

Thanks for the answers!

I am trying the Xonar DG on Linux and it sounds quiet powerful and nice even if maybe not time correct. I will try also the Audigy and let you know.

The Xonar range is based on the CMI8738 - a mediocre chipset in my opinion. Output is flat and muffled, muddy bass and cut-off treble. I couldn't fix it by messing with the provided equalizer or by changing the bitrate. In contrast the audigy line has a crisp output with good mid-bass and crisp treble. Frankly I much prefer the ALC1150 over the 8738 - changing to a higher bitrate on the realtek really makes a difference, and independent sounds and instruments are much easier to distinguish.

I don't use headphones tough, I use a set of 2x20w bass-reflex monitors. The xonar seems to sound a bit better when using a setup that comes with a subwoofer, but on large-ish 2.0 monitors it just sounds bad.

kanecvr wrote:

386SX wrote:

Thanks for the answers!

I am trying the Xonar DG on Linux and it sounds quiet powerful and nice even if maybe not time correct. I will try also the Audigy and let you know.

The Xonar range is based on the CMI8738 - a mediocre chipset in my opinion. Output is flat and muffled, muddy bass and cut-off treble. I couldn't fix it by messing with the provided equalizer or by changing the bitrate. In contrast the audigy line has a crisp output with good mid-bass and crisp treble. Frankly I much prefer the ALC1150 over the 8738 - changing to a higher bitrate on the realtek really makes a difference, and independent sounds and instruments are much easier to distinguish.

I don't use headphones tough, I use a set of 2x20w bass-reflex monitors. The xonar seems to sound a bit better when using a setup that comes with a subwoofer, but on large-ish 2.0 monitors it just sounds bad.

Not too sure if your point of comparison was a Xonar card or a CMI8738 based card. The 8738 is generally less capable than the CMedia Oxygen chips used on the Xonar product line. Completely different generations of hardware. Also, analog output has less (or nothing for bit-perfect capable chipsets) to do with the codec and more to do with the DAC, amplification, and filtering used.

So, what specific model of card did you try so we know what we have product feedback for?

It has the CMI-8786 chip not the xx38. 😉 I don't know anyway if better or not than the Audigy.

The card is this for sure:

Output Signal-to-Noise Ratio (A-Weighted) (Front-out) :
105 dB
Input Signal-to-Noise Ratio (A-Weighted) :
103 dB
Output THD+N at 1kHz (Front-out) :
<0.0025 %(-92 dB)
Input THD+N at 1kHz :
<0.0022 %(-93 dB)
Frequency Response (-3dB, 24bit/96KHz input) :
10 Hz to 48 KHz
Audio Processor :C-Media CMI8786 High-Definition Sound Processor (Max. 96KHz/24bit)

The codec chip onboard is the Cirrus Logic CS4245 (from papers 104 dB, 24-Bit, 192 kHz)

I tried the CMI8738 cards laley and despite a great support (drivers for Win9x too, ultra easy installation and memory usage) mine version had low volume generally.

Looking at the specs, the CS4245 should be able to deliver a high quality output, but implementation specifics or amplification might be causing problems.

gdjacobs wrote:

Looking at the specs, the CS4245 should be able to deliver a high quality output, but implementation specifics or amplification might be causing problems.

I think Asus did an higher one version of this audio series, this one should be the low end but with headphone amplifier built in. I will compare it with the Audigy but I think they should be close.