Internal Sound Card SPDIF 5.1 output

[Louarias]

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

 

[alyoshka]

Download Ac3Filter from http://ac3filter.net/wiki/AC3Filter
Configure the SPDIF output as required. You most probably have that missing.

 

[gamerk316]

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.