Shall I buy a soundcard..

[Burly]

At the minute I'm using onboard sound from my Asus P5K-VM via optical out. This is going to a £200 Yamaha 5.1 set (AV receiver). Will I notice better audio if I were to say use the cheapest Asus card?

Also a thing that is annoying with the onboard is it doesnt seem to output dolby 5.1/dts and is stuck on 2 channels. Thought it was a driver issue but I cant find any setting to adjust.

 

[Burly]

Easily noticable?

 

[Burly]

Wait,

Optical out is digital yes? It goes straight to your reciever (the yammy), this then interprets the digital signal and converts it to analog to play out of your speakers.

A new soundscard will not make a difference if you continue to use a digital line out with you new card. If you use analog then it will depend if your amp is better at decoding that you soundcard.

The 5.1 issue, make sure that you are outputting full digital. If you are using vlc, your audio out should be set to the SPDIF option, then your amp will decode the digital Dolby signal if it has the capabilties. Being a yammy they put a lot of money into advancing decoders within thier amps so I assume it will support most formats.

In VLC I see "Use S/PDIF when available" under Audio - this correct?
Thanks for your post. Are you sure of this though?