Also from Jordan "I currently have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard and am using the SPDIF output to my receiver for all playback. I thought as well that if I used the digital output that it would A) just pass the digital stream to my receiver for decoding, and B) give me the best sound quality.
The reason I wrote is that I read some specs that had me confused.
Second question, what about using a soundcard that uses a 96 hrz stream over a 48? Think it would be worthwhile?
I'm currently storing music as AAC (Apple iTunes) at 256kbs. Should I be thinking about storing my music some other way? "
Hi Jordan,
1) My understanding that by using the SPDIF port the sound card is just acting as an interface, eg you set your software to use SPDIF and a digital copy of the bitstream from the source is sent to the port and all the processing is done by the AV AMP (hence the D-A specs of your AMP matter not your card).
2) I don't really know the answer with what sampling freq to use, but your AMP would need to support it.
3)
AAC@256kbs is not bad and perfectly suited to portable music players etc, but you will notice a difference with a good set up (I certainly did as soon as my Axioms arrived and I had to re-rip the lot in a Lossless format). I've decided to keep everything on the HTPC in a lossless format (for me WMA Lossless made sence but there are others), and then covert them on the fly to MP3 when syncing the portable player.
Thanks
Nathan
