Hello All, Just looking for a bit of feedback really from anyone who owns one of these cards. I've ready many reviews, but getting information from the end user is always a great idea in my opinion. Importantly, I would like to know if it plays iTunes in 5.1 surround sound if the music is stereo. My old Creative card did, but is now slowly dieing, but I wouldn't want to get a card that doesn't convert all stereo to 5.1 within iTunes. Any feedback would be great, especially any comparisons with creative cards, if anyone has had the opportunity to use both. PS. Current operating System is Windows 7 Pro 64*, just incase that may make a difference Thanks, Regards, Damien
if you choose 2 channels as input, 5.1 as speaker configuration, then enable "Dolby Pro Logic IIx". you'll get sounds coming out of all your speakers. but it's a manual process, isn't automated
Hi there, Thanks for your reply. Is this in reference to iTunes, once enabling those options, I will get 5.1 surround sound through iTunes even with songs recorded in Stereo. If so, does that mean, I need to change the settings everytime I load up a game/ or listen to music ?
I don't use iTunes so I can't comment specifically on that, but the card can also upsample to 7.1 via its GS3D emulation (the GX mode) without reducing the number of input channels in the card's settings and without messing with Dolby stuff, but it simply copies the signals to the extra speakers without any of the extra filtering or processing that the Dolby options do, AFAIK. Unfortunately, GX mode isn't universally compatible or desirable with all games so that may not be of much use to you anyway, since it still needs to be switched on and off manually. I personally found neither of those options to be worth the hassle of going into the Xonar Audio centre every time I wanted to switch between gaming/movies/music, etc. so these days I leave both of those options off and just use a matrix mixer plugin for WinAmp to do the same job of upsampling to 5.1. The lack of automation on this point is a serious failing of the Xonar cards (or rather, their software) but thankfully almost everything else about them is great.
