Advice on a good Soundcard for Digital Out

[benafk]

I need advice on a good sound card to purchase so I can send digital out to my home theatre receiver. I have encoded the full AC3 track on all my divx movies (just muxed) and want to decode the signal using my reciever.

Has anyone had experience doing this? What sound card would you recommend?

[Emp3r0r]

I've used turtle beach santa cruz and nforce mcp-d which both work exceptionally well with AC3 pass-through. santa cruz I used SPDIF to hook up. with nForce I used optical. I recommend either solutions.

[Raistlin_13]

sb live! player 5.1 retail is only at 35 € right now .. and should be just fine :)

[Yvez]

Hercules Game Theater 6.1

it has all the connectors you'll need to connect to a home theater receiver (digital optical, digital coaxial, analog)

it's cheaper the the Audigy and it's got much more features :)

[UGAthecat]

I also have to recommend the Game Theater very highly, its just plain awsome in my pc/theater system, using digital out for movies, and 6 channel direct output for 3d sound in games and other non ac3 sources (full size rca jacks, not the mini headphone jacks). Then all the other nice features, like auto headphone detection, built in usb hub in the breakout box (hide the pc, keep the breakout box next to the receivever), the list goes on and on!


to be honest tho, if you are looking for ONLY ac3 digital out, with no other features, you should be able to use any card that has digital out with equal results, as the signal won't be modified at all on the sound card.

[Emp3r0r]

you should be able to use any card that has digital out with equal results, as the signal won't be modified at all on the sound card. I've heard sblive doesn't produce correct digital streams.

[MvB]

@Emp3r0r

Where did you hear this? If the internal decoder of the sb live is turned of (audiohq) I never got a problem with all digital streams like dts, dd5.1, dd 5.1ex, dts ex etc. Seems, that my 2 soundblaster live don't touch the streams in any way.

There's one thing that might cause problems: The digital out of the sb live is a stereo jack. the digital signal is on both channels, but only one of the two digital channels will carry the digital passthru. So if you can't get it to work, try the other channel (and, of course, servicepack 2 on w2k is required, and you have to deactivate sbinternal decoding). Never got a problem.

MvB

[mwillberg]

Where did you hear this?
I believe he is refering to the fact that the signal level of the digital output is not within specs on (many, don't know about all) Live-cards. Seems to work ok for most amps though, but a friend of mine had trouble getting a coaxial->optical adapter to work, probably because the signal level of the coaxial output was too low.

So the actual digital stream is of course ok, otherwise it couldn't work in external amplifiers, but the incorrect signal level could lead to problems...

By the way, why don't you take a look at the AC3-SP/DIF-FAQ in the audio forum.

[MvB]

I've tried it. On the left channel are all digital signals except the passthrustreams. On the right are all channels. Don't think this is a problem of the voltage or anything like that, because dolby sourround and stereo work on this channel. Maybe it's a phenomen only i encountered with my two sblive but i don't think so. And that wasn't mentioned in the faq so i thought it would be ok to tell it here?

(Don't remember exactly, which of the channels it holding the passthru, maybe it's vice versa than stated above, but digital signals are comming on both channels)