So, suffice to say I’ve been a sound card guy for as long as I’ve been PC gaming. Between being the most cost effective avenue towards surround sound, my head being too big to fit most headphones comfortably, and just experiencing the positional awareness of such elements in play, I haven’t been satisfied with onboard audio since “Nvidia sound storm” stopped being a thing they did and every motherboard manufacturer started relying on the $2 Realtek chips that have been the bane of my ears ever since. To that end, HDMI(or more accurately, GPU audio) also doesn’t really help if I’m running a game that was made with eax support in mind, let alone any other form of audio API before OpenAL became the standard.
It’s like society understands well enough how DirectX works for graphics in tuning visual fidelity to match the lowest common denominator. But you tell them that it does the same thing with respects to audio and they address you like you’re telling them some kind of esoteric recipe.
So, back to the topic at hand…
I recently discovered about a sound blaster X4 external DAC being a thing. Which, now that I have a set of razer tiamat 7.1v2’s that do (just barely) fit my head, having discreet 7.1 support is kind of a big deal now. The tiamat ’s control box can then effortlessly pass through the sound to speakers from there when I don’t need to wear them, or just fatigued with them.
The question I keep getting conflicting information on, is whether this DAC can support the processing of legacy eax code. With internal sound cards of the Audigy and X-Fi series, this was resolved on newer operating systems with ALchemy as a failsafe to tunnel EAX code to run through the hardware. I’m to understand that creative labs opened up licensing to be more agnostic-ish, but Realtek famously refuses to support any of it unless the company installing their chip foots the bill.
So thing is, I don’t know if the X4 DAC, can support games run through ALchemy. Some sources say yes, some say no. And my own searching is just as conflicted with only speculation and no concrete answers.
Not that I have an immediate need for a DAC; just that if the X4 does support it effectively, it affords me an avenue of flexibility towards if I need to do an ITX build down the line, or if just lacking an expansion slot to put in a proper sound card.