Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Digital Out from soundcard to receiver

I'm thinking of replacing my Soundblaster Live OEM with either the Soundblaster Live 5.1 or Audigy. I currently run left and right analog out to my receiver and use Dolby ProLogic 2 for the surrounds, but I want to run to the rca digital input on my receiver and use that to decode DD and DTS to fully utilize my surrounds and to get the best possible signal. I use the computer as my DVD player, run composite video out from the video card, and switch everything through the receiver. I could get a separate DVD player, but I would prefer to wait for the SACD-DVD Audio battle to finish. The Soundblaster site is more than a little confusing on that score. Anyone have some advice or pointers. Thanks

Not to sound too negative but personally i hate soundblaster products with a passion.
Driver and intergrated software hell and they have been since the release of Live version.
Their advertising brilliance is what really sells those cards (don't be fooled by their 24bit sound specs and the like, it is a bit of tomfoolery).

But, in regards to your issue, any soundcard with a digital out connection should be able to connect to your receiver via an optical toslink or rca coaxial with no problems. Your receiver DAC should take it from there.

A friend of mine runs his this way using a SB Audigy. Other sound cards do exist however including the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (my sound card) which has a versa jack with an rca digital out and the Hercules Gamesound Fortissimo II (optical in and out).

buy this, it's better and cheaper. i have done comparisons, and i am a computer technician among other things, so i know a fair bit about computers:

Guillemot Game Theatre XP
www.guillemot.com

The game theatre xp is essentially the same as the fortissimo II except is has a breakout box and some extra connections (i also have one at home on our second office computer).
If you are interested in having all the extra stuff then pay the extra cash but if you are more on a budget, go for the Turtle Beach or the Foritissimo II.

I agree with the others you should avoid the Soundblaster cards, they haven't done anything really innovative with their products in several years, and there are others that give you more bang for the buck.

My only warning about the Game Theater XP and Fortissimo II is that there have been some reports of people having problems passing DD and DTS with certain hardware and DVD software combinations. I haven't followed the issue too closely since I don't own one of these cards, but you may want to do some research and see if these issues have been resolved before purchasing.

If you don't mind spending a bit more money, you should look into the Midiman soundcards, either the Audiophile 24/96 or the Delta 410. These cards have very high-quality coax digital outputs, and they also have excellent quality DAC's for analog output, you may want to use for music playback. Depending on the quality of your receiver or pre/pro, these cards may actually have better-sounding DAC's.

The AP 24/96 is a 2-channel card, the Delta 410 has 7 analog-out channels, which can be useful for software decoding of DD/DTS. I'm also hopeful that in the future we'll see software playback solutions for DVD-A and/or SACD (the latter being less likely).

For ordering info on the Midiman soundcards, visit http://www.digitalconnection.com

For lots and lots of information about everything related to home theater computers, visit the HTPC forum at http://www.avsforum.com

Jeff

All,

Interesting discussion points and info. I enjoy getting other's ideas and opinions.

But I have a slightly different issue in this area. I have been using a SB Live (value edition) for over 2 years, and while I have no real problems or issues with it, what I have noticed about it was that when playing mp3 files, the sound quality really was dependent upon the decoding engine within the playback software. Example: While Winamp is quick and easy to use - MMJukebox sounds far superior (on my Yamaha speakers anyway)

I was wondering if anybody else noticed something similar with different software on their soundcards???

Randyman

In reply to:

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I was wondering if anybody else noticed something similar with different software on their soundcards???

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Decoding quality certainly can vary from one player to the next. However, if you're getting terrible audio quality from the latest version of Winamp, it's probably because you're using the EQ. Winamp's EQ sucks bigtime, and adds quite a bit of distortion. The same is probably to at least to some extent for the EQ's in other software players.

I use the MAD mp3 decoder plugin with Winamp, which does 24-bit decoding and sounds very good. (The 24-bit audio can be output directly if your soundcard support it, otherwise MAD can dither it down to 16-bit).

I've always found winamp to be relatively unstable compared to sonique so i quit using it awhile ago.
I do like the full screen visual effects though. But i have yet to hook up my computer to the new Axiom system. I'm saving that for a boring saturday.

You might want to take a look at M-Audio's new Sonica. It might be of some benefit to you.

http://www.midiman.net/

There is a long thread at AVSForum with some good info on the Sonica. Cliff Watson, from DigitalConnection, has some insights in his posts to the thread.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=a392e301b982f10184618b656fc41144&threadid=153140&highlight=sonica

chesseroo,

I haven't had any stability problems with recent versions of Winamp, but then again I'm using 3rd party input and output plugins, so Winamp is really just a shell (I'm not using it's built-in playback capabilities). In addition to the MAD input plugin for MP3's, I also use the CDReader plugin for audio CD's and the Directsound output with SSRC plugin, which allows me to upsample to 96khz. The end-result is a pure digital 24/96 signal straight to my pre/pro, which sounds fantastic. MP3's encoded by lame at 320k sound totally transparent; I've tried distinguishing them from the original in ABX blind testing and was unable to.

I also use the AlbumList plugin to manage my MP3 collection, and for full-screen visualization I use MilkDrop, which looks truly awesome on a 55" HDTV.