AV Receiver with PC?

[Troezar]

Not being that up on audio would this be possible?

AV receiver + AMP +DAC connected to the PC to give all the advantages of external upgradeable hardware and things like Dolby Atmos, surround sound for 3D effects/ positional audio in games.

It sounds more expensive but with more options?

 

[Troezar]

Yes, the receiver is just a pass through for video generally. The receiver will do your amping and audio decoding, so no need for other hardware. You can split video and audio signal however and use a separate dac/amp, but i'd just buy a decent receiver in the first place.

Gsync/freesync are unlikely to work through a receiver. Some *may* work, but i can't be sure unless you checked every single brand.

All depends what your goal/desire is?

So many options! I see what you're saying. I was thinking you could run the audio separately through the AV receiver thus retaining all the advantages of the GPU video processing and as you say Freesync, whilst also getting things like Dolby Atmos that I don't think the high end sound cards provide?

Am I right in thinking you can't have the best of both worlds?

 

[Troezar]

@Radox-0 Yes, your PC set up sounds like what I was trying to describe. Separating the audio and video so you can get the best of both. I presume if you watched a film on your PC you could still get the support for things like Atmos?

 

[Troezar]

The above i thought was only available via 3rd party software, nice to see otherwise, but i *think* that may still not be the case for AMD and therefore freesync. But i'm no GPU guru, and seem to remember looking at splitting before, can't remember the drawbacks but didn't do it myself, but that could be for another reason. So Nvidia might be a good shout there.

What is your end goal OP?

Couple of pointers. You can still plug USB amps into your computer while using a receiver, windows does this easy. Win10 offers some surround functions for speakers or headphones. Higher end motherboards offer native/built in spdif or coax out.
Sound Blaster X7 is a bit of everything product:
Integrated mic, mic port, spdif in and out, blutooth, speaker amp, dual headphone ports, surround decoder, an attractive piece of kit.

How big is your budget xD You could easily spend thousands before touching a speaker or headphone.

My end goal was just to see if it was possible to get both the advantages of gsync/Freesync whilst also not compromising on film/video. It looks like it is possible albeit not as elegant as dropping in a soundcard but so far that seems to be the only way to do it all.

@Radox-0 thanks, not too many compromises then, just a bit of fiddling around with cables and settings.

 

[Troezar]

Ah yeah, now i remember reading about that. Thanks for the info! @RadoX

OP, It's really just the money thing then. The X7 above is USB input btw. Quality output of sound would be better from a better dac, but you'll need speakers/headphones of top quality to notice. But people's own hearing or preference will be the dictator of that.

Agreed, I'm just old enough to not hear some of the more annoying sounds, probably have me a few quid! I'm definitely not in the money no object category and at the moment the garden is absorbing all the spare cash