What sound card?

[Zephran]

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.

 

[Zephran]

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).

 

[Zephran]

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?