Looking for a bit perfect soundcard

BloodyL · 16 May 2008 at 22:54

My old VIA ENVY24 based M-Audio Revolution 7.1 was a great little card, pity the drivers for WinXP x64 are none existent.
I stayed on WinXP x86 until the card itself died, then shifted to WinXP x64.

So, my requirements:

WinXP x64 drivers.
Bit Perfect audio for passing DTS waves to my AV receiver through digital out (no preference for coax or optical).
Dolby Digital Live / DTS Connect for gaming.
Must be better SQ than onboard Realtek HD Audio chipset (not hard to do, I know)

Not bothered about:
EAX, any stereo to surround effects, HRTF or anything like that.

I figure the Xonar is looking good but I've not come across anything to suggest it is capable of passing through a DTS bitstream without upsampling it to 48Khz.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Oh, forgot to mention I have a digital 5.1 setup for surround movies/music/gaming and an analogue 2.1 setup for stereo music.

james.miller · 17 May 2008 at 01:02

i can play 44.1khz DTS wave files in foobar2000 with the foo_dts component using my xonar D2, my amp picks up the 5.1 DTS and decodes it fine. saying that though, i can tell the xonar to output DD5.1 instead and the amp still picks it up and plays it lol

BloodyL · 17 May 2008 at 02:13

Interesting, I'll give foo_dts a go on what I've got now, cheers.

Thanks for the reminder, I use Foobar myself, I stopped using Winamp once they started to expand to video formats and became bloatware.

BloodyL · 17 May 2008 at 02:22

Nope, no good, no matter whether I use DirectSound, Kernel Streaming or ASIO4ALL, each and everytime I hear static rather than the 44.1Khz DTS Wave.
(No replaygain, all replaygain settings to none, and nothing in the DSP manager chain, output set to 16bit none dithered when available.)

So it does appear that I am indeed looking for a new sound card.
Cheers anyways, and thanks for the tip, the Xonar is looking like the card I'm after.

BloodyL · 31 May 2008 at 03:10

james.miller said:
i can play 44.1khz DTS wave files in foobar2000 with the foo_dts component using my xonar D2, my amp picks up the 5.1 DTS and decodes it fine.

Well, I have the D2X installed and I'm still unable to passthrough 44.1khz DTS audio.

In foobar I have no Replaygain, no DSP's and 16bit output.
I have tried Directsound, Kernel Streaming and ASIO.
I have tried PCM & SPDIF loopback output in the D2X control panel.

All to no avail.

james.miller said:
saying that though, i can tell the xonar to output DD5.1 instead and the amp still picks it up and plays it lol

Do you mean even if you turn on DDL your amp will still see the DTS stream?
From what I'm working with here I can only imagine foo_dts is decoding the stream, foobar is sending it to the analogues and the Dolby Digital Live/DTS Connect system is catching it, re-encoding it to either DTS or DD then outputting to your amp for further decoding.

Maybe this has something to do with Win XP Pro x64 edition, I'm not sure.