What sound card?

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20 Oct 2005
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I am intending to buy my first non-onboard sound for many years, however I am not sure what is suitable for me.

I intend to purchase some logitech z-5400 speakers to go with it, but also want to have my speedlink medusa headset connected at the same time, so i will need both the more common analogue 5.1 connectors as well as a digital output, preferably optical as I already have a long cable for this but coax would be OK i suppose. I will be using it for gaming (mainly on headphones), movies and a bit of music (both mainly on speakers) and will often be doing more than one of these at once, though I doubt this is a problem for recent cards, certainly isn't for onboard.

My original intention was to buy a X-fi music , probably the oem version, however it doesn't seem to have optical outputs. This leaves me wondering if the X-Fi Fatal1ty is the best option, or if something else (and probably cheaper) would be as good, particularly as I don't listen to much music.

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
Thanks for the reply. I do game a lot, mostly WoW, which as far as I am aware doesn't make too much use of audio hardware, but also a bit of BF2 and Warcraft 3. I know BF2 makes specific use of EAX4, but I can live without this if there is a good reason.

Having read a bit more about the cards it seems to me that the X-fi digital outputs (such as on the X-fi platinum on offer this week) do not make full use of the card's abilities. Can anyone comment on this.

While looking at the suggested HDA Digital X-Mystique I noticed the HDA Digital X-Plosion seemed to have some particularly interesting DTS encoding features, is this card any good for games/movies? Cost isn't too much of an issue as long as I get the right card (within reason).
 
Hi, I have got the x-fi xtreme music card and the difference in BF2 compared to onboard is amazing (You can hear where youre enimies are and the sound is a lot more detailed) this is also with a cheap pair of headphones, so i think an x-fi is a good choice for games. Sorry i cant comment on the digital outputs because i only have the xtreme music.

Hope this helps

Ben
 
Zephran said:
Thanks for the reply. I do game a lot, mostly WoW, which as far as I am aware doesn't make too much use of audio hardware, but also a bit of BF2 and Warcraft 3. I know BF2 makes specific use of EAX4, but I can live without this if there is a good reason.

Having read a bit more about the cards it seems to me that the X-fi digital outputs (such as on the X-fi platinum on offer this week) do not make full use of the card's abilities. Can anyone comment on this.

While looking at the suggested HDA Digital X-Mystique I noticed the HDA Digital X-Plosion seemed to have some particularly interesting DTS encoding features, is this card any good for games/movies? Cost isn't too much of an issue as long as I get the right card (within reason).

Yeah, to be honest i am not really sure how good EAX is, i don't have it on my laptop and never have a problem with the sound.
Not sure about the X-Fi digital outputs.

I suggested the mystique over the xplosion mainly because its cheaper and with those speakers, you won't use the DTS encoding. The DTS encoding is good if you use an AV Reciever connected up to speakers because it will encode all your PC sounds be it games or films or whatever in to DTS for your reciever to decode. Thist is meant to improve the quality a bit over getting the soundcard to decode it for you. The mystique and the x-fi both have the dolby digital version of this (xplosion has both).
 
Kamakazie! said:
I suggested the mystique over the xplosion mainly because its cheaper and with those speakers, you won't use the DTS encoding.

Thanks again for the advice. As far as I am aware the speakers (logitech z-5400) do support DTS, so is there some reason I would not want to use it, or is it not much of an improvement?
 
I am happy with my set up. I am still using a pair of ArrowMania speakers (bought them 10 years ago) with onboard AC97 sound driver. These speakers have great bass and treble controls. As I use my computer in the bedroom (not big) it works well as the sound rebounds off the walls and gives me almost the same as surround sound for games and movies. :)
 
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