Cyrus Gaming Soundkey on a desktop

[ironmysox]

First post in this forum so hi to all.

So, my EVGA Nu Audio being RMA'd as I type (second time!!!!!) so I am now going to use a Cyrus Gaming Soundkey (a very generous gift from a friend who works at a hi fi shop!!) for the meantime. I don't use headphones much so I will be connecting it via analogue, 3.5mm to phono's to my Denon Mini Stereo Amp. Having never used a usb soundcard / dac before, only onboard and internal soundcards, is there anything I need to change or set up? Looking at the Cyrus site it just looks plug and play but a few reviews have mentioned 3rd party 3D Audio software but no names given.

Also, will it perform like a soundcard for gaming? I'm not, how to say, knowledgeable when it comes to PC audio output. Obviously in some games you can set the amount of channels, Diablo 3 for instance lets you choose 128. Is that relative to to power of your soundcard or are they processed by the CPU and then audio is just fed to what ever audio device you are using?


Thanks for reading

Chris

 

[EsaT]

I wonder if they have some faulty batch out or how you're having that little luck...
(do you have good PSU?)

Since Microsoft killed sound hardware acceleration after WinXP taking game sounds back to 20+ years ago games have done their sound mixing with software "renderer" on CPU.

And without separate software taking in 5.1/7.1 from Windows/any source softwares to do downmix or binaural sound simulation, that's likely plain dumb single purpose DAC capable to handling only stereo sound.
If you have only stereo speakers, you're not missing anything, because games can produce stereo sound signal themselves.
But for headphone gaming that sucks, because we hear sound from headphones differently than from speakers.

 

[ironmysox]

The issue I have (and others on the EVGA forums) is the toslink socket falls out and you cant fit it back in and a Toslink cable will not stay in without out it sadly. For myself and other users they have issued very quick RMA's and have swapped old for new. I'm not going to use Toslink looking forward. Anyway, thanks for the info. Using the Cyrus Gamekey everything seems ok at the moment. In actual fact, music sounds slightly better than with the NuAudio!!!! I really appreciate the information on how Windows now deals with sound in games. You learn something new every day