Yes, RealTek onboard sound. The last PCI sound card I had was troubled by the Via Southbridge bug. I exchanged it for the comparable Terratec card, and when onboard surpassed that generation of sound cards I didn't buy an upgrade.
So far I'm very happy with the X-540. I got with a rebate through Amazon's own shop for returns they think they cannot sell as new. Which means everything is new except for a missing sticker somewhere.
It cost me 56 EUR instead of the usual 80., both including VAT.
I've read lots of reviews about how much the Logitech sets suck, how weak the bass is under load, and I know that you get what you pay for and that everybody (really, everybody!) says to start at
www.teufel.de and only buy something else if it's clearly cheaper. I wasn't willing to spend the 160 EUR on Teufel's entry level system though, so something cheaper had to do.
Obviously a cheap set with 5 roar cubes and a small subwoofer isn't the best choice for a music lover. It's made for sound effects, (talking) voice and noisy music. I'm pleasantly surprised about the pretty decend way it plays most kinds of music though. I find the quality of different music is heavily dependent on the quality of the source material and the presets in the software equalizer though. My standard setting is "Rock" because I prefer music with lots of guitars. That's fine for such music and of course also for films and games. Dido sounds like crap on it though.
Here's a short list of footage I tried:
- movies: Afro Samurai & AS Resurrection; great sound track by The RZA. Sounds absolutely stunning on "Rock". Heavy, pumping bass, but quite diverse in other instruments. RZA isn't limited to Wu-Tang stuff.
- Dido: Too calm for such a set. Sounds like crap on "Rock", it's somewhat tolerable on "Pop" and "Live". Generally speaking I think such precise, calm high quality pop with a lot of filigree things going on in the background and a supersweet voice in the foreground is too demanding for such a cheap speaker set. If you want to listen to such music buy at least a good 2.1 set for 100 EUR.
- Scorpions: Sounds good on "Rock", but the source material was too old.
- Peppers: Sounds great. No surprise, because that's exactly what the X-540 can.
- Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms: No chance. That's even worse than Dido.
- Dire Straits, louder stuff: pretty good.
- Seeed: The only dancable stuff I have here. Sounds good although a bit different on both "Rock", "Pop" and "Live". A lot of bass and 11 people playing against each other is something the X-540 likes.
- Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia: After the experience with Dido and Brothers in Arms I was quite surprised that Knopfler's solo CD sounds good. Maybe that's because it's not as extremely calm as the aforementioned CDs and because the sound is deeper and not in the usual pop range. The better source material compared to Brothers certainly also helped. Some experimentation with the equalizer was necessary.
Summary:
The X-540 is good enough for the occasional CD. If music is one of your primary hobbies the X-540 is quite okay for noisy music with lots of action. If you listen to carefully made pop or even classic, do yourself a favour and buy something better.