Worth buying a DTS sound card?

joewm18 · 5 Jun 2007 at 08:04

Hi, first off i'll be honest by saying I know very little about sound cards and have always relied on using inbuilt solutions which are part of the motherboard - the gigabyte mobo i have at the mo has a 7.1 card, and have recently connected my surround sound via SPDIF...

While the 5.1 surround system i have is capable of dolby digital and DTS, it didn't even cross my mind to think the sound card would need the decoders also to be able to use these for when playing dvd's etc. :rolleyes:

While music sounds good, playing CSS the sound is fairly attrocious and i'm guessing this is going to be down to the lousy sound card.

So my question is, can any1 recommend me the best card for the money - which provides dolby digital, DTS, and makes everything sound sweet.

I want to be spending a lot under 100 if i can help it, and if that's possible??

Thanks a lot, Joe.

squiffy · 5 Jun 2007 at 08:19

For Dolby Digital & DTS you just want the sound to stream audio to the digital output. You don't want to encoding on the fly 2 channel or games to Dolby Digital or DTS.

If you're using digital out the decoders in the soundcard are bypassed. The amp is doing it.

So basically you just need a soundcard with gaming support and digital out. X-Fi Extreme Music will do you.

joewm18 · 5 Jun 2007 at 08:51

I see, thanks a lot for the help - looking around and reading reviews i think i'll go for the X-fi Extreme Gamer, i'm guessing this offers all the features of the card u mentioned? but with a bit more oomph and freeing up CPU usage in games -bonus!

Thanks again.

fizzy · 5 Jun 2007 at 16:01

The above is true if you simply want to play surround sound from movies, video files etc - you can get most cards with spdif (digital) outputs to simply send the data stream straight out, unencoded.

The problem lies with games. Games are designed to use the multichannel function of direct x and the like, and as such are unable to send "raw" surround information to your decoder/amp. For that you will require a card that processes all the channels and converts them to DD/DTS in hardware. This is where the like of the auzentech cards and all this "live dolby digital/dts" stuff comes in.

The other solution would be to use standard audio cables to the 6 channel input on your amp (if it has one?), and then the digital connection can be used to pass through digital sound from movies. I know that most dvd player software can decode audio within windows, but I've found they never seem to do as good a job as a "proper" surround amp/digital connection.

Using the 6 channel "normal" output will mean the signal is being created by the digital to analoque converters on the card itself, and so sound quality will depend a lot on the quality of your card. Using the digital output means your amp does all the work, and will therefore depend on the quality of your external decoder/amp.

Hope that makes sense?