Zakosian, your soundcard most certainly has plenty to do with sound quality. There are other factors, as well, when dealing with sound delivered over the Internet.
The PC is a very "noisy" environment. That has always been the #1 challenge for PC soundcards. Creative has come a long way, from being at the bottom of the heap to near the top of the heap. (I still think Turtle Beach, now faded into obscurity, is at the top of the heap, at least for consumer cards.)
The #2 challenge, which is still largely ignored, as the noise issue was in the early days, is throughput and CPU overhead. Creative has been behind the 8-ball on this one, as FIFO-based designs (such as Turtle Beach's) long ago surpassed Creative's DMA-based approach (about the time of the 386... prior to that, DMA was faster than PIO with a FIFO) and newer PCI bus-mastering designs leave the DMA design in the dust.
An offshoot of #2 is increasing demand for audio-processing - text-to-speech, speech-to-text, positional audio (on-the-fly positioning of sound in space, such as in games) etc. etc. While all of this can be done in the CPU, it can be quite intensive. Do you really want your CPU spending 80% of it's time processing audio? High-end sound cards can do much of this processing on-board.
Finally, as the PC becomes integrated into home entertainment systems, the demands will become even greater - where we used to accept AM-radio quality sound cards, we are now going to demand audiophile quality - current sound cards can in some cases reach the *low* end specs of audiophile equipment - there is much more ground yet to cover.
So, while basic PC sound requirements can and probably will be met with low-end sound cards and on-the-motherboard solutions, I beleive that there will be not only significant, but increasing demand for high-end PC sound solutions.
CREAF, presumably, is positioning itself to meet that demand, while also participating in the PC sound market across the board. |
