SprayingMango
the_Scarlet_one
SprayingMango
It looks like an amazing card but...why? Onboard audio or external DAC / Amps are all people use these days. Those of us with NVLINK / SLI setups + NVME drives can't use internal cards due to a lack of available PCIe lanes. If you made something like this in an external form factor I would buy it without hesitation.
Believe it or not, not everyone uses onboard audio or external DAC/Amps, and not everyone is limited to z series motherboards. Most users don’t have 2 video cards, and many (not most) have x series motherboard that have plenty of extra PCI lanes, so there is plenty of space to fit extra pci devices without hindering anything.
Only Z series motherboard are limited to what you mention, so.. plenty of people could easily use this.
Even with an X series board, which I have, I’ve run out of lanes with my NVLink and NVME drives populated. SLI support is the best it’s been in years also. People that do not use SLI always love to spread misinformation and comment on things they have no experience with.
This audio card does not even support MQA so streaming Tidal or other lossless audio will effectively be 13 bit.
MQA is junk, it's a good thing this card does not support it. Are there any streaming services out there that "actually" provide true lossless audio at a minimum quality of redbook 16bit/44.1khz? Frankly, the sooner people realize that FLAC is the way to go the better.
This card honestly hits all the right notes that a sound card SHOULD have. The swappable opamps is a really cool feature that power users will love, the 600ohm max headphone impedance is awesome for users with headphones that require more drive such as the Sennheiser HD600s, DSD output support, has all the right input recording formats and resolutions.
Coming from someone who has quite a bit of experience with audio equipment (both analog and digital), I would be all over this if I were looking for an internal sound card. I just have no need personally as I have a stupid amount of audio equipment already that does everything this does and more, and the PCIE lane limitation on the mainstream chipsets is most definitely a factor, especially as it sounds like SLI support may potentially increase with current and future gen GPUs.