Is Optical Sound Quality Better?

[Tommy B]

Does using digital optical output via the X-fi actually improve quality over the standard analogue output?

If you had a 2 channel AMP that accepted both Optical and Phono inputs. Which would be better?

 

[Tommy B]

Not necessarily. The optical out will simply bypass the DAC so something else will have to do the digital to analogue conversion. A good dedicated DAC is likely to do a better job than the X-Fi, but the ones built into MM speakers may not. I guess the amp you mentioned must also act as a DAC, otherwise I have no idea how it would work. You could test it, since it is hard to tell

Isn't it more to do with the fact that via optical the sound quality isn't lost whilst being transported between the PC and the Amp?

 

[Tommy B]

generally, if you want audio on the cheap then optical is far better. You can output a perfectly decent digital PCM 2 channel signal from a motherboard that is jsut as good as any digital signal from an x-fi, and better than analogue outputs from anythign up to an x-fi (ni general)

Analogue costs. A good analogue output will cost you, good leads to connect it to your analogue amp will cost you.

At the moment I've got a very high quality jack>dual phono gold plated lead, it's ridiculously thick for what it is.