I have a Rampage III mobo and a set of Logitech Z906 5.1 speakers. They sound great at the moment, but could they sound better? Should I use an optical cable - and if so, which one and from where? Should I get a dedicated sound card - or is the onboard hardware good enough?
Dedicated Soundcard is a must and any optical cable is fine. This will give you Dolby Digital Live once enabled in the Soundcard control panel. If you choose to use DD Live as "always on" like I do. Then you need to make sure "Speakers" is your default and not "SPDIF" in the Windows Sound control panel found in Control Panel. (Most people don't know this, and select SPDIF as default which only gives you 2ch ProLogic II.) Once set as mentioned above, you can select 5.1 speakers in the sound card control panel - Then select either Dolby Digital Live or DTS. Now you will get the best out of your speakers! Sound card - Look to spend about £60+ Optical cable - Unless your running 5 meter length or more, then a budget cable is fine.
If it was my money - then this is what I would get. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/creative-sound-blaster-z-pci-express-ultra-high-performance-sound-card Unless you can pick up a Creative XFi Fatality Titanium Pro 7.1 cheap on the Market Place here. I got mine for £30. So might be worth you posting a wanted thread.
Just my two cents as I bought a xonar essence stx today. Great reviews, great performance, absolutely crap documentation. It was a pig to set up today. You get two quick start guides, both covering how you insert a card into a slot and use a molex plug to power it. Then you're on your own sucker.
Their control panel is as simple as it gets, though. The four dropdowns on the main page are the only controls that matter: channels, sample rate (if you're not bit-perfect), analog out, SPDIF out. Analog out lets you choose between headphones/speakers, SPDIF out between PCM and Dolby Digital Live. Set your channels/sample rate to whatever you need, choose your outputs, done. Everything else is extraneous, at least for me. I want zero EQ or other processing (though Dolby Headphone is pretty cool).
