Recommend me a soundcard!!! For windows 7. Must have optical out... I have my av system near my pc finally!!! can handle up to 7.1 but I think I'd skimp and stay at 5.1. £70 is the most I'd spend! Thankyou
If you're using optical there is no point. if you have optical on your onboard it will be just as good. It just passes the digital signal on, and nothing more. If you don't have optical onboard, does your av have hdmi? that would be just as good, also a digital signal. Just sending raw 1's and 0's it dosen't matter. Your dac in the av unit will do all of the work. Soundcards are only worthwhile when dealing with analog. Save your money.
I do not rate the xonar. I had the D2X and compared to the XFI titanium it pi$$es rings around the Xonar. Sound quality, drivers, game support, Creative have done well!
Well, can my gfx card send it all over hdmi? For everything? Also, good shout on the optical on the mobo... I hadn't thought of that and it's right there infront of my eyes! That's £70 saved... cheers! Just need a really long cable now.
*Start of friendly discussion!* Are you absolutely sure? Sound cards do additional 'stuff' to even out sound and reduce noise. I've got to say, using onboard sound after becoming accustomed to a sound card is a horrible, horrible experience - crap noise reduction, 'flatter' sounds. Having said that, I am using analogue outputs.
Pretty sure. It's just going to output 1's and 0's and thats it whether it is onboard or a card. Also 98% or so cards will still use the cpu clock for spdif, so unless you're willing to splash out quite a lot for a pro studio card with a dedicated on board digital clock you're not gaining anything. Also optical is not subject to signal noise in the way that copper is. Since the av should have its own dac, it's going to do all of the heavy lifting either way. DSP effects are often undesirable on toslink, as many consumer grade dacs in av equipment don't handle them well or at all. It's better for them to receive the raw data and do any dsp on it's side rather than receiving it that way. The only case where you would need to get an addon card for toslink, is in the case of a crippled chip onboard that can't do the 96khz/24bit toslink max.
I have started using an x-fi titanium and you can notice the difference! And if you order from pc world online its only £59.99 and thats cheaper than anywhere i have found online... that makes a difference...pc world not usually the cheapest.. ever. I had the xonar d2x and it was a pretty card and came with A LOT of cables but I am much happier with the x-fi titanium.
Go with Lysol's advice. While it's not true that "digital is just digital" as many people will say, he is right in that better quality digital signals come from better clocking, and it's unlikely to be any different on a nice soundcard than onboard. That said, it might be worth looking into the xonars etc to see. However, what has a far greater impact on quality than the clock the audio is sent with is the quality of the device recieving and its ability to reject jitter. So it may really come down to how good your AV gear is - using the analogue outs from some sound cards is probably better than the DAC inputs in a lot of cheaper AV recievers.
It's a Onkyo TX-SR606, they are the cheaper end but where considered the best in their class I believe. Although mine has a busted hdmi board at the moment... but I'll send it off to be fixed soon so no worries!
Tricky then, if it's not obviously better or worse without being able to A/B. Don't have a friend with a nice soundcard you could borrow?
Unfortunately, none of my friends really put much into their pcs, so it's going to be a case of seeing whether I'm happy with Onkyos performance, which so far in life, bar the hdmi incident, I have been very.
