Razer Barracuda - or how Nenso failed at computer audio...

[Nenso]

Ok... I've done it. I really did!

I went ahead and bought the worse possible sound card ever with the Razer brand name smeared all over it instead of the Asus Xonar or the Azuretech Prelude, which are supposedly much better for their price and actually designed correctly.

I mean... how bad could it be?

Reason? Nothing really, it costs $199.99CAD here and jumped on it when saw it go for $89.99CAD in one of the Sunday special savings ad for my local computer shop.

Impressions:

I just installed this card into my computer less than an hour ago and I already have many complaints about it. The main reason I bought it, apart from the relatively cheap price, was because it could upsample S/PDIF out to 192 KHz and to take a load off my E6420 Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz.)

Razer's factory's quality control is horrible because my card's metal bracket crooked, which made it screwing it to my computer case because it wasn't straight. After spending ten minutes figuring things out, I was finally done and decided to dig out my AT-HA25D DAC/amp that has been replaced by my Pico to try out the card's S/PDIF out later.

Installing the drivers were easy and the interface was pretty straightforward. I didn't use any of the settings or the Dolby Digital/DTS effects, for it completely destroyed the music, despite sounding alright on computer multimedia speakers. I went ahead and changed the output sample rate to 192 KHz to try it out.

What happened next really shocked me. The LED on my DAC/amp blinked like a flickering candle and the sound comming out of my ATH-W1000 was all distortion and jitter. I thought that my soundcard was defected and its S/PDIF out was corrupted. After lowering the sample rate to 96 KHz, the music played normally, if not better than the S/PDIF output on my motherboard. There goes one of the funcations of the card I purchased it for.

Conclusion:

Stay away from the Razer Barracuda. It is not worth it at all. I think I might go ahead and return it to NCIX, because not only does the quality of the card suck, but it cannot even upsample to 192 KHz. Now I know first-hand why everyone, apart from rabid Razer cultists, have given this card a thumbs down and woot.com has it on their site every month.

[JBLoudG20]

Why buy a shitty sound card, when you own a pico?

[aardvark baguette]

Conclusion:

Stay away from internal sound cards

ftfy

[grawk]

attention whore

[Fungi]

ftfy

Unless they're spitting out coaxial SPDIF!

[ojnihs]

Why buy a shitty sound card, when you own a pico?

x2

[Nenso]

Why buy a shitty sound card, when you own a pico?

Onboard soundcards use the CPU to process sound, which can be a problem because some programs, such as certain games, use up a lot of the CPU.

Soundcards aren't only for audio performance purposes, they can help make games run smoother as well.

Of course, I'm still going to use my Pico to listen to music.

[JBLoudG20]

I know all that, but it still makes absolutely no sense to me. If your computer actually gains a noticeable improvement from offloading sound computation, then your performance upgrade would have been better served with a different piece of hardware.

[Dusty Chalk]

Onboard soundcards use the CPU to process sound, which can be a problem because some programs, such as certain games, use up a lot of the CPU.

Soundcards aren't only for audio performance purposes, they can help make games run smoother as well.

I think you're confusing soundcards with video cards. While this is certainly true of video cards, it's a lot less true of soundcards. If my understanding is correct, the only offloading to soundcards that the computer does is the settings at the driver. (E.G. 'TruSurround', on my M-Audio Sonica, can be turned on and off by the Sonica Control Panel, but there's zero awareness by any other audio application that this is going on.)

[n_maher]

I know all that, but it still makes absolutely no sense to me.

Thread title updated appropriately.

[deepak]

Please. Stop. Posting

[Dusty Chalk]

Can you cite your source for that? I'm skeptical.

[Nenso]

I see, I will look into it.

[Elephas]

I thought the OP was somewhat informative, at least now I know not to buy a Razer sound card.

For music, I've had good results with an RME HDSP 9632. Its analog outputs are not very good, but digital output to an external DAC works very well.

[Nenso]

Obligatory 4 years later update:

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, or if anyone is knowledgable about PC audio, but here goes.

I am once again in the market for a soundcard for a new PC. The purpose of the card would be to use Dolby Headphone for gaming and watching movies.

Are there any good cards out there that can output DTS/Dolby Digital Live through the digital out, and allow me output it to an external DAC? A problem I see with this is that unless I have a headphone amp/DAC that could decode the Dolby signal, it will not work. (I can't just use any old headphone amp/DAC.)

Would any cards be able to output the Dolby surround signal directly to the HeadAmp Pico?

I think this card can do what I want, and maybe even more: http://www.auzentech...etheater_hd.php

Edit: After reading around the web for more info... I think I might just buy the Astro MixAmp and call it a day. I will just neglect SQ when gaming, and use Pico when I want to watch movies. If someone has any good suggestions, please let me know!

Edited June 15, 2012 by Nenso