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.

THe last time i used winamp was at least a year ago. I'm sure new versions have come out since but i simply have not gone back to it. Netscape installations usually come with it now as well so i do still have it around here somewhere.

I've been curious to hear more about the mp3 debate and whether they can be used on quality systems without hearing any difference between wav original versions.
I know that the standard mp3 sampling sounds 'thin' on my present system. There are no heavy bass sounds and the upper range seems lacking compared to the original songs on cd. THe mid range is not very rich. I guess this is not surprising since the mp3 encoding process is designed to shrink the file by removing or reducing the info from similar notes, ranges of sound beyond or between human hearing limits (supposedly), etc. But on a quality system, you can notice these shrunken data holes. However, if you increase the sampling rate of the mp3, how much more would you have to go to get quality sound that is indistinguishable from the original?

This is just a question from an interest point of view. All the mixed cds i make are still wav to cda format since playing them in the car requires compatibility and my car cd player is not mp3 compatible, nor will it be upgraded anytime soon.

I would agree with pretty much everything you say about MP3 quality. A lot of people will say that 192k VBR is good enough to be transparent, but in my testing it was not. That said, the Lame encoder has come a long way and at very high bitrates the quality is excellent. I decided to just go with 320k because disks are cheap now and it's still much better compression than you get with the lossless codecs, and for me 320 is totally transparent.

If your primary reason for ripping is to make compilation CD's, it's probably not worth it. But I have a large collection of MP3's on my server, and since I use an HTPC in my home theater I have access to all of my music this way without having to shuffle CD's.

BTW there's a tool that you can use to perform blind testing at pcabx.com. I think it's easy for people to come to whatever conclusion they want to when they're not doing true blind-testing, so this tool is pretty useful for separating actual differences from imagined ones.

All,

I guess I started/continued an interesting discussion topic here (do we want to move it to a separate string??) – I just don’t have the capability to directly connect my PC to my Stereo/HT system (they are in different rooms) So my experience of the quality of sound produced by the different encoders/decoders is limited to my SB card and my Yamaha PC speakers (they are pretty decent – but they are NOT anything like good stereo [Axiom] speakers).

Personally (at least on my system at the moment) I found that 160k provided a real good compromise between sound quality and disc space usage. (128k was really hit or miss) Perhaps I need to be a bit more critical and give 192k another audition…..

But to touch on an even different topic, here is a link to and article in PCWorld magazine last year that compared different encoding formats (mp3, wma, aac, real) to see how a panel compared their “accuracy” to the CD. It’s interesting – but still doesn’t take into account the different decoding engines available (Lame. Fraunhofer, etc.) So I still am at a loss to find the “best sounding” one until I can get connection of PC to Stereo. Many of you are fortunate in that you can do just that. With the huge collection of mp3 files I have, I hope to be able to do that one of these days – but since the quality of the encoding varies, they may not sound much better than listening to FM radio over the Stereo.

jkohn – thanks for all those links. I will check them out!

Randyman

I went into the mp3 listening without any preconceived notions of what i would hear, or at least i tried. I just did it on a whim the other day out of curiousity.
But the audible difference was so noticeable, i didn't need to do a true blind test. Again i used 2 cd players which i've already determined to be so close in performance that with my test cds, i could not distinguish a difference. I take the same music copied to 2 cds and start both in each cd player then swap back and forth between the inputs. This mostly eliminates the long wait for audible memory to lose any thought.
However, that being said, if we go back to the higher sampling rates, then i would agree for sure, blind testing may be the only method of discerning any difference.

Mp3's at 320, to me, are not as good as on the CD. Not with my M22's to test with

i will look up that MAD 24 bit decoder and try it.
Otherwise, i agree, SONIQUE all the way!!