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Internal Sound Card SPDIF 5.1 output

Tags:
  • Sound Cards
  • Connection
  • PCI
  • Components
Last response: in Components
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February 22, 2012 7:04:24 PM

Evening,

I purchased a internal PCI Xonar DG 5.1 the sound was superb coming from the PC but after reading and playing with the setting I can only acheive a 2 channel SPDIF output. This means this is useless to me as I want to connect my surround sound system.

The question is which sound card acheives best results for SPDIF 5.1 output? (96Khz would be lovely)

On a budget.

Thanks

More about : internal sound card spdif output

February 23, 2012 1:22:58 PM

SPDIF is incapable of transmitting uncompressed 5.1 audio. Its a limitation of the specification. 5.1 Dolby and DTS formats can be transmitted over SPDIF however, but you lose a ton of audio quality as those are very low quality audio formats.

The DG does NOT have the ability to encode to either format; the lowest Xonars with encoding capability are the ASUS Xonar DS (DTS via DTS Connect) and ASUS Xonar D1/DX (Dolby via Dolby Digital Live).

The DG DOES support Dolby Headphone however, which does a very good job of emulating 5.1 on a stereo output. For headphones, I prefer it to real 5.1, as it does a much better job of replicating a soundspace then multiple headphone drivers do. If you use headphones [with the DG, you should be], you should try that out before going to another card with encoding capability.
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