Sound Card with SPDIF

So my 30th birthday is on Monday and I have rented a cinema screen for 3 hours of gaming with some friends.

I am taking my Xbox One and want to take my PC too however the cinema said I need SPDIF Audio so I have been looking for a cheap sound card to give me that.

My intention had been this one: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus-xonar-dgx-5.1-pci-express-sound-card-with-built-in-headphone-amp-sc-015-as.html however having done some reading on it people say it doesn't output 5.1 on the SPDIF connection and one of the reviews on Overclockers says:

"Great card if you don't care about decoded digital. Great for headphones. Not so good if your trying to get a digital source for your 5.1 desktop spearkers."

Which seems a bit of a waste for the cinema sound system. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?

That's correct. Reason being is that SPDIF requires the audio to be encoded with Dolby Digital or DTS in order for 5.1 to be passed over it. The vast majority of games do not use DD or DTS, unlike DVD/BD, which have audio tracks already encoded.

What you need is Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect. Both are real time 5.1 encoders that encode on the fly. Cheapest card that will give or or the other, is Xonar DSX. Twice as much as the DGX, but I'm guessing royalties to Dolby and DTS don't come cheap.

Has a mini toslink 3.5mm socket, and comes with an adaptor so a standard toslink cable can be used. DSX is DTS only, so if you need Dolby Digital, you'd need either a DX or Soundblaster Z. SB Z supports both DTS and DD, unlike the Xonar's, which support one or the other.

Edit: Actually, just thinking about it; you can get DDL and DTSC to work from Realtek codec, if your motherboard has that and optical connection. You need to install cracked drivers though, because although nearly all Realtek codecs are DTSC and DDL capable, motherboard manufacturers disable it on a software level, except for their high end expensive boards.

Have a look at this thread, see if you can get it to work, if you have Realtke and optical out from your motherboard. https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18626211&highlight=realtek

Unfortunately no optical on my motherboard (Gigabyte Z97-SLI). Given that I only wanted to take the PC for Mortal Kombat and to see how good a few games look at that size I suspect I'm going to be better off getting Mortal Kombat on the Xbox One than buying a sound card.

Thanks for your detailed reply, genuinely appreciated.

You're welcome.

Yeah £45 or more, is not such a small amount of money to spend if it's really only going to be for 3 hours use.

Anyway of connecting the PC to the Xbox one? Then you can use the spdif on the Xbox.