When I ordered my computer, I selected a C-Media 5.1 PCI Audio Card which I knew wasn't "top of the line" but I had thought that it would at least be a slight upgrade.  From Day 1, I have been very dissapointed with the sound quality (I do have decent speakers), especially when playing MP3's or even CD's.  Most of the Window's sounds seem ok, but they are usually too short to be able to compare them to anything.

Anyways, I decided to to Disable the C-Media PCI card and Enable the on-board IDT High Definition Audio driver.  I switched the speaker output cables and played some music and was absolutely blown away by how much better it sounded.  I then went back in forth between the two, adjusting EQ settings, speaker settings, surround effects, etc. but I could not get anywhere near the onboard card's sound quality.

I suppose I'll just pull out the C-Media PCI card and toss it in the garbage, but I will be moving my home office to a larger room which could accomodate a full 5.1 Speaker Setup and obviously the onboard IDT hardware doesn't support that. 

Does anybody have any ideas out there?  Any reccomendations on a different PCI card?  Or should I just stick with the onboard?

Thanks in advance and Happy Holidays!on-board sound is a lot better then it used to be.

My motherboard has a "Realtek High Definition Audio" on board sound, which works just fine. However, I use a X-Fi XtremeGamer card (which I took from my older PC when I BUILT this one.

There are some key differences; Although both my on-board sound as well as the X-Fi support various game related extensions (such as EAX) and any number of EQ filters, and so forth; there is a key difference between an on-board card- and MANY low-end sound cards- and "better" sound cards, such as the X-Fi XtremeGamer (Which used to be called xtremeMusic, and then they CHANGED the name for no reason). The difference is that the "cheaper" alternatives use host-based processing- that is, any signal processing is not performed on the card, but rather is performed by the system CPU. And this can cause a huge bottleneck if the CPU can't keep up. The Sound Quality is usually about the same, not counting the various equalizers and enhancements (such as Creative's "Crystalizer" processing.


many people think the concept of having a separate chip handle all the sound processing is sort of silly; but, on the other hand, some people thought it was silly when GRAPHICS cards started being able to draw stuff on their own (Video Accelerators), and speed can be critical in some cases.

In this case, what you did was replace an adequate sound system (the on-board sound) with a mediocre one; it used to be true that all sound cards were better in all ways then any on-board solution, but that is no LONGER the case (as you've discovered).

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I suppose I'll just pull out the C-Media PCI card and toss it in the garbage, but I will be moving my home office to a larger room which could accomodate a full 5.1 Speaker Setup and obviously the onboard IDT hardware doesn't support that.