Define what decent audio is?

I see this crap repeated over and over: since Nvidia dropped Soundstorm,
they have sucked, they haven't had a real DSP, etc. It's all bull****.
Soundstorm was just a Dolby Digital real-time encoder. The actual signal
processing was, and still is, performed on the southbridge. Now, the audio
codecs quality on the motherboards has never been great, and are usually
very noisy, but just because NVidia wisely chose to drop the expensive DD
5.1 encoder chip doesn't suddenly mean their audio quality got measureably
worse.