Asus STX II 7.1 Or Powercolor Devil HDX 7.1 ?

Dicehunter · 20 Dec 2015 at 20:38

Work mate of mine is looking at these 2 sound cards, Now I have the STXII and think it's immense and can highly recommend it but looking at the Powercolor I can't really see that much difference apart from it being £130 less.

I'm not to up on sound components but what makes the STXII £130 more expensive than the Devil ?

Sighn · 27 Dec 2015 at 22:52

I'm curious about this too, with the exception that the Powercolor doesn't support DDL and DTS.

Marine-RX179 · 28 Dec 2015 at 07:20

Is your friend only using the card for stereo, or is he look at the 7.1 card because of intending to go 5.1 or 7.1 setup?

darreny · 28 Dec 2015 at 08:25

If it doesn't support ddl or dts then how is it a 7.1 card. Excuse my ignorance but I've never used a pc for home cinema

Marine-RX179 · 28 Dec 2015 at 10:39

darreny said:
If it doesn't support ddl or dts then how is it a 7.1 card. Excuse my ignorance but I've never used a pc for home cinema

I think it is the Dolby Digital "Live" feature is missing, which is for encoding your audio to surround on the fly (meaning if you have games or videos that are only stereo, the PC can encoding it to Dolby Digital.

The soundcard should have no problem decoding video or games that are already Dolby Digital encoding.

I myself watch quite a bit of streaming videos, and comparing to letting my AV receiver to convert the stereo audio to Pro Logic II, I find that the audio sound better if I use my soundcard to use Dolby Digital Live to encode first and then send the Dobly Digital audio to the receiver.

Sighn · 28 Dec 2015 at 14:35

darreny said:
If it doesn't support ddl or dts then how is it a 7.1 card. Excuse my ignorance but I've never used a pc for home cinema

It allows for surround sound without the requirement of the sister card.
As said above, the sound card will encode multi-channel sourced audio, on the fly, to pass through the bandwidth-limited link of SPDIF to a receiver. The receiver will then decode and convert to analogue.

Marine-RX179 said:
I myself watch quite a bit of streaming videos, and comparing to letting my AV receiver to convert the stereo audio to Pro Logic II, I find that the audio sound better if I use my soundcard to use Dolby Digital Live to encode first and then send the Dobly Digital audio to the receiver.

Pro Logic II upmixes stereo for 5.1. The effect is like a widened stereo.
DDL simply encodes surround sound for SPDIF. The final product is full surround.