Sound card that has Optical out

elrasho

elrasho

elrasho

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Joined
12 Jan 2009
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I'm looking for a sound card that has optical out which will carry 5.1 Dolby sound into my receiver. I've seen some for as little as £20 but the reviews say they don't carry 5.1 over the Optical, just through the audio jacks.
 
Xonar DG carries 5.1 DD. What the reviews say is that it doesn't convert 5.1 to DD on the fly, but if your source audio is already DD encoded it'll just pass that instead :)
 
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What do you want to do?

For DVDs etc, practically every card with optical out supports 5.1 over optical.

For games and other realtime content, you need Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect to have 5.1 over optical.
 
I want to connect the sound card to my receiver and watch 1080P MKV movies. Im hoping the sound will be recognised as Dolby DTS on my receiver so I get 5.1 surround sound (it has a decoder in it that supports Doly Pro Logic and DTS)
 
as long as your player supports pass thru over optical (most do) then yeah youll be fine, but you do know you wont get any better sound quality just by using optical. using 3.5mm jacks will result in equally good quality as it just means the dolby digital is being decoded by your sound card instead of your reciever. and if your doing anything other than watching movies, compressing everything to dd/dts via dd live or dts connect is actually degrading your quality as both formats are lossy, so id stick to analogue myself
 
cjkennedy said:
but you do know you wont get any better sound quality just by using optical
Click to expand...

Wrong. If you use the jacks you'll be leaving the decoding to the sound card. If you use optical you'll leave the decoding to the AVR. 2 totally different devices will have 2 different sound signatures and I suspect one will sound better than the other, too.
 
not really wrong... fair enough if you have a crap sound card and a top of the range reciever, then optical would be better, but only for movies and dd/dts encoded sources, otherwise your just compressing everything into a lossy format to send to your reciever...
 
oh sorry i should have known what reciever you have without you saying :confused: would have thought any reciever that has speaker outputs for 5.1 would have analogue inputs aswell as optical but guess not
 
Gf0oguQO7ydqPDZy_500.jpg
3rd row of connectors from the left, that is your board isnt it? :S
 
cjkennedy said:
not really wrong...
Click to expand...

No, it is really wrong. The way your post came across was that whether you used the jacks or optical you'd get the same sound quality/signature out which would only happen if you had the same device acting as the DAC, using optical keeps the signal digital for longer because as soon as you change it to analogue you start getting signal deterioration. How noticeable is it? Negligible to non-existent most of the time.

Also the OP is looking for a sound card, implying he's using onboard. Onboard DAC via jack ports is in no way ever going to be as good as an AVRs DAC, so your comment isn't even helpful because as you stated crap soundcard vs AVR the AVR is going to sound better.

/rant

I still maintain the DG as the best option, you can use the S/PDIF passthrough for movies and if you upgrade in the future and want a soundcard for a PC, the DG is a worthy upgrade from onboard as a DAC, plus a headphone amp ;)
 
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