Sample rate of 96KHz or 192KHz for Home Theater PC?

[CrazieEddie]

I'm setting up a Vista Media Center PC, which is outputting to a Harmon Kardon AVR120 receiver (5.1, Dolby Digital & DTS). I've been researching on a sound card, HT Omega Claro or Asus Xonar D2. Both have a sample rate of 192KHz. The prefer not to spend that much on a sound card. I was wondering if I could get good quality audio with a lower end card, such as an HT Omega Striker, which only has a sample rate of 96KHz. I'm not familiar with audio cards and I was wondering if the I could get good theater sound with DVD's movies or even music using the lower sample rate or should I just go with a higher sample rate. I do not plan to do any gaming on the machine.

Here are my system specs:
System: Dell PowerEdge Sc420 (Pentium 4 - 3.4GHz with Hyperthreading)
RAM: 4Gb
Video: Nvidia Geforece 8400 GS
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate x86


Here are my previous posts...
Will a 7.1 sound card output to a 5.1 receiver?
C-Media CMI8788 chipset Versus Asus AV200

Thanks

 

[cjl]

96kHz is more than enough, unless you want to reproduce frequencies above 48kHz. Doing so would be somewhat pointless, as very few speakers and receivers can output cleanly above 20kHz or so though, and most people can only hear to 17-18kHz (if you have extremely good hearing, you can hear as high as 21kHz or so, but that can even be reproduced by DVD quality audio, with a sample rate of 48kHz). Basically, the sample rate determines the maximum reproducible frequency, which will always be the sample rate divided by two. Basically, well implemented 44.1kHz or 48kHz (CD and DVD quality respectively) is adequate for all frequencies humans can hear, and 96kHz is more than adequate. 192kHz has no real benefits whatsoever for the quality of the audio, so I wouldn't worry about it at all.