Thread: Are you getting the most out of that expensive soundcard you bought?

Ok if you bought an uber sound card like an X-fi which i highly suggest you get one, here's how to get what you paid for in your music.

Most likely when you buy music online or get it from any source it will be an MP3 format with 46 KHZ. But if you have an X-fi card it can crank out 96 KHZ or if you bought the super uber one even 196 KHZ. Here's how to get that

First you will need this handy piece of software
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ Media converter will do but this is the easiest.

Once you have it installed it dont take much.
All you do is right click on the song or highlight them all, right click and choose convert. Then you set the stats. Change the format to Wav. and if you have a standard X-fi set the refresh rate to 96KHZ and 32 Bit. If you have an X-fi elite change it to 196KHZ. The channels category is if you have surround or not. If you have 5.1 speakers then set it to that. If not set it to 2.1.

Sorry that i don't have picture but when i saved the screenshot it gave me just a plain white background, and nothing else.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16829102014

That's the one i own. It's freaking sick. Haven't got around to messing with everything but for games it's the hottness.

The sound is so good, i can here everything. I know exactly where people are in cs maps.

It's so unfair, it's like fishing with dynamite.

You have the best damn soundcard period.

This one is mine. The only difference is that you have the whole controller thing at the front of your case. This produces the same exact sound though

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16829102005

Hell yeah. Hands down best sound cards :10

This is mine is it the same as you guys have?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16829102005

Nuck

Yes.

Also if you are limited on hard drive space then you need to keep the format as MP3. An MP3 is a compressed file where as a Wav is uncompressed. Uncompressed=better quality but is unecesarry.

Just to give you some stats

Brad Paisley-Whisky Lullaby(probably the best damn so song ever): 4:19
MP3 Format-8 Megs
Wav Format- 571 Megs

Brad Paisley-Celebrity:3:42
Mp3 Format-8.5 Megs
Wav Format-489 Megs

These are just the first 2 songs i converted.

For all of you who dont know what a meg is, a Meg=1MB, or 1024 KB, Or 10,408,576 Bytes

But hell if you decided that you wanted mountains and mountains of HD space(like me), and your hard drive is the most expensive part on your computer then it's time to crank the stuff.

it is not recommended to try and "upconvert" any sort of compressed file format...the only thing it increases is the file size, not sound quality. and then if you use that "upconverted" file and compress it again in order to make it smaller for an mp3 or whatnot, the sound quality will actually get worse, because its effectively been compressed twice.

ie, it will only be as good as the original source. so if you converted a compressed 46k mp3 to an uncompressed 96k wave file, it will still sound like a compressed 46k mp3 file...but 10 times the file size... really the only time you would want to convert an mp3 to a wave file is if you wanted to make an audio cd from mp3s.

I can tell a difference going from 46 KHZ to 96 or even 196 KHZ.