External DD encoder?

[Reality Bites]

I'm looking to move to a shuttle. Fedup of a bulky case but the downside is that the soundcard i've got won't fit in one and the sound is meant to be pretty carp.

I love the DD encoding of my mystique and wondered if there is any external boxes out there which would do the job?

 

[Reality Bites]

I very much doubt it'll sound any different using analogue than digital...plus with pretty much any encoding/decoding process you're going to add latency and compression, so the analogue is likely to be better anyway (depending on the quality of the soundcard DAC vs decoder DAC that is).

my current card makes a very good job of encoding game data. Spreads the sound around nicely.

I've got a DD decoder and 5.1 speaker setup and connect my sound card over a optical link.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could upgrade the sound module in the shuttles to include the DDlive encoding.

 

[Reality Bites]

Analogue wouldn't stop the sound being 'spread around'...afterall it's only encoding the channels that would be sent to the analogue ports to a digital stream anyway.

it would be in AC3 i think.....so rear channels would give the same sound.

With DD the rear channels would give a seperate distinct sound.

Anyway, from the replies i don't think there is going to be a way until Intel ship the suttle MB's with the DDLive module enables on the sound chips