I’m obsessed with music. I can’t imagine a day without it. Regardless of what I’m doing, there’s pretty much always something playing in the background. From time to time I move my work setup from one room to another, just to shake things up, and break some habits. Recently I did this, and it involved using a different machine to usual as my desktop.
After setting up, I noticed that something just didn’t sound right with my music. All the high end frequencies sounded harsh and mashed together. The low end wasn’t anything amazing either. I tried some different speakers. It sounded even worse. At this point I thought I was going crazy, and tried some headphones (my tried and tested Sennheiser HD-280′s — What I like about these is that I’ve used them long enough that I know what to expect from them, so I know when something isn’t sounding right). Again, it sounded lifeless and dull, and high frequencies were almost painful.

What the hell was going on ? I started wondering if I could blame it on software. Maybe there was something in the driver that I could tweak. Maybe Pulseaudio was doing something wrong. I spent an afternoon looking for things to configure, going as far as disabling power management features in the hope that was the cause. In the end, I gave up. I just decided that the “High Definition Audio Controller” built into the ICH7 chipset, or some other components in the audio signal path on the motherboard was crap.

A few months ago, Chris Lee visited, and brought with him a NuForce Icon uDAC. (He also brought a pair of $1500 headphones for which he took much ridicule for being an audiophile). I got the chance to try out his setup at the time, and I admit it did sound great (even with my cheapo $99 headphones).

Remembering all this, I decided to pick up a udac, and give it a shot. As suspected, it worked perfectly. Complete plug and play experience, with no complications, and the crystal clear audio that I wanted. I can hear bass frequencies again. High frequencies are reproduced in a manner that doesn’t sound like tinnitus.

It’s weird. I used to think that the days of add-in sound cards were over with the advent of onboard motherboard sound. For as long as there exist motherboard implementations that sound this bad, I’m thankful that you can still pick up inexpensive quality solutions.