i-Link on a sound card.

poltergeist666 · 24 May 2006 at 07:38

I used to own a Pioneer 868 DVD player, that I had i-Linked to the big Denon flagship amp, and it sounded awesome. I have sold the Pio, to try and realise some of it's value, as I feel it will plummet when HD-DVD/Blueray hit the market.

Does any soundcard have a i-Link port, that can utilise those connections on the wave of AV amps from Pioneer and Denon, as it sounded awesome when using this method, in comparison to SPDIF. i.e next to no jitter.

I intend building a HTPC, and one of the things I would like to do, is to connect it to the amp, by the above method.

Cheers

Jerry

Topgun · 24 May 2006 at 12:51

Interesting question. Any soundcard with a firewire connection (creative audigy) or indeed any pc with firewire at all could in principle be used to output i-link audio. I don't think there is any way to make this work at the moment sadly. Your only real option is to get a really good soundcard and use the analogue outputs (X-Fi, Envy24 HT-S etc) or just settle for spdif.

Caged · 24 May 2006 at 16:55

You get jitter on SPDIF?

Topgun · 24 May 2006 at 17:28

I think the advantage of firewire is higher bandwidth for SACD use not reduced jitter. The way I understand it, jitter is introduced by timing errors in the digital bitstream caused by the CD transport mechanism and is not affected by the type of digital interface.