Depends on your receivers' DAC, if you buy a D2/X and use analogue connections and your amp is cheap and has a poor quality DAC the card will sound better. But I agree completely, I see absolutely no reason to compress to DTS to decompress at the AVR stage when you can just send the signal decompressed at the beginning.
absolutely! analogue is a different ball game, you arent wrong. but for the purpose of the discussion i was sticking to digital here only because the op hasnt asked about analogue
There is no doubt that that decent analogue outputs in to a decent amp will sound marvellous and absolutely 100% better than anything digital in to an AV amp, but that's a bit beyond the OP's scope (and mine for that matter
)
Why resample to 96hkz at all? There is no gain in doing this...
Why encode to 1.5mb dts then decode it with the amp? there's more downsides to that than resampling to 96khz. I re-sample to 96khz actually because it means i dont have to keep switching the sampling frequency of the card in windows depending on what im playing. It simplifies everything, just one less thing to think about really. by doing this, 44.1khz gets re-sampled to 96khz in foobar, 96khz plays bit-perfect and everything else( DD,DTS,DD TrueHD and DTS:MA) is bitstreamed. all from my graphics card, all automated as well. It's pretty hard to beat that really. if i could have win7 switch outputs on the fly then i wouldnt resample to 96khz at all, but there you go.
I 'upsample' my audio to 96KHz too, but only because I have some 96KHz audio (vinyl Pink Floyd for example) and I haven't yet figured how to get it to change with Foobar2000. In my case the upsampling is just a byproduct of having it set to play 96KHz audio at 96KHz and may be the same for James.
bingo!
proper soundcards are a big advantage for games, not for anything else.
eh?
What about analogue out when using headphones into a Headphone amp ?
What about audio recording and latency?
See above
What if you haven't a card without HDMI that can bitstream?
the OPs card does. if i didnt have a card that could bitstream...id get one. Analogue is fine if you splash out on the cables but thats not for me, personally. my 5850 bitstreams everything (except 44.1khz but thats a windows issue as above) so why bother with anything else? if i wanted a gaming card, id get an Xfi, not a xonar, as they are still better processors for gaming, though the outputs arent up to scratch. if I wanted to do headphones
properly id use the bit-perfect spdif output of my onboard sound in to a dedicated dac/amp combo. win/win
Sadly i cant though, so im stuck here using the headphone output of 20 year old JVC amp until i can convince the GF to let me buy the amp and dac kits that i've always wanted. Oh the joys of having babies
Glad i bought my hd650's when i did
