morphine wrote:Well, I will have to defend the crab here. I've been both the victim of bad motherboard audio and good motherboard audio. In all honesty, in the last 10-ish years, it's all come down to the motherboard's DACs, op-amps, and circuitry noise isolation. The digital side, that is, the Realtek and C-Media chips, work perfectly fine. In fact, I'll even go as far to say that if I have a good output stage, I'd rather have a Realtek solution over anything else, simply because the drivers Just Work.
Then again, the best solution for PC audio folks that aren't interested in surround has been an affordable entry-level USB studio interface, really.
Realtek codecs are highly integrated, and are designed to be a single-chip solution. Unlike the C-Media chips used in cards like the Xonar series, Realtek includes their own built-in DACs and produce the analog output signals directly instead of using digital I2S interfaces to drive separate DAC chips.
While it is certainly possible to use external op-amps with Realtek (and a few higher-end onboard implementations do this), most motherboards take the easy way out and simply hang the analog outputs directly off the Realtek chip. Realtek does include integrated headphone amps for the analog outputs which can be enabled in software; unless you've got fairly sensitive headphones, you really want to use this feature.
However you slice it, you're still stuck with Realtek's DACs.
There's one more potential fly in the ointment. Realtek's reference design includes 100uF DC blocking capacitors on the front out circuit. For low impedance (16 ohm or lower) headphones, that's going to result in some noticeable frequency response roll-off below 100Hz unless the motherboard designer has deviated from the reference design...
That said, yes Realtek is actually pretty good these days, and most of the bad reputation of onboard sound is a holdover from the "bad old days" when motherboard designers had no clue about noise isolation and Realtek's drivers sucked.
