[Oreo]

This came as a very big surprise to me, hooking up my 360 to my PC soundcard through Optical sounds (very surprisingly) really quite good.

It sounds far better than my EMU 0404, i'm not saying it's flat. But it just sounds really good. I was expecting the quality to be quite alot worse than a £65 soundcard, but no, maybe not.
I think i need a better PC Soundcard...I would prefer to go down the M-Audio, or another brand but not EMU (My experience with them was pretty poor).

[surgeVel]

Makes sense for a 360's audio chip to be good. It is supposed to be a "multimedia home theater hub" so of course it better play good audio.

I will be getting the Turtle Beach Ear Force X4 headset for my 360 and it uses the optical port, so I'm glad to hear it works great!

[Oreo]

Yeh but think of it, they sell an entire cheepest xbox 360 for about £119. And a £65 soundcard doesn't sound as good as it, they must loose a lot of money because that's not cheep sound chip in there, let alone the rest of the console.

I dunno, i just wouldnt expect a £200ish console to sound as good as a dedicated soundcard almost half the price.

But i guess the console costs more to make than they sell it for.

[surgeVel]

Actually it doesn't. Microsoft has been making a profit per console sold since late 2006. I'm not sure how they did it, but they don't sell the console below cost.

[Oreo]

Well that proves my point even more so

Were they not making money on them before late 2006 then ?

[surgeVel]

They started out taking a loss of about $50 at the very beginning. PS3 started out with a near $200 loss and STILL takes a loss per console sold. The 360 with it's extra year of production helped it lower the costs by quite a bit.

[Oreo]

$50 per console, ouch, thats like a 100million dollar loss then at the begginning. Probably more.

[surgeVel]

Most often a new console will take at least a moderate loss. That is because they make the majority of their profits from games, accessories, and other sales. So if you assume that the console takes a $50 loss, but Microsoft makes a $20-30 profit per game, then after 2-3 games they have a profit. Take into account that the Xbox 360 attach rate is about 2 times the others (Wii is 2.4, PS3 is 2.3 while Xbox 360 is projected as high as 7.2), and Microsoft makes a good profit. The attach rate is how many accessories or games are purchased by each console owner.

[ricanflow]

Oreo, the EMU 0404 is an entry level card from them, its the cheapest one.

And it was never meant for high end sound playback or recording, its made for basic recording.

These is a real emu interface:
E-MU 1616M PCI | Sweetwater.com

[CalcProgrammer1]

The 360's sound chip is located on the GPU die I'm pretty sure, not sure what kind it is, but it does sound good.