A PCI sound card which supports 'Dolby Digital Live!' ?

Cannibal Corpse

Cannibal Corpse

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 22, 2002
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Hello All,
I just finished building a budget HTPC system and it is using Core i3 and ASUS P8 H67-M Pro motherboard, running Win7 x64 Ultimate. The onboard sound card does not support Dolby Digital decoding, and when I installed my old PCI Soundblaster X-Fi pro (with I/O front panel), my Sony A/V unit displays PCM 48, even though in the Creative Lab's (ENCODER Tab) the external decoder Dolby Digital option is checked . (there is no option for DD Live or DTS, just Dolby Digital, "requires external decoder" option)

On my other gaming machine, which has a PCI-e Xi-Fi Fatality card, the second I enable use Dolby Digital Live! option, I can visibly see that the Pioneer AV units displays that its decoding DD or when I click on DTS Connect, it displays DTS. (the ENCODER Tab, clearly has DD Live! and DTS connect options however)

Now I am thinking about picking up a card that has Dolby Digital Live! and DTS support out of the box (and I don't have to buy it from Creative Labs) instead. As you know my motherboard does NOT have a 1X PCI-e card, so I can NOT get a X-Fi PCI-e (or any other brands for that matter).

I kindly, need your recommendation picking up a PCI card that supports these features. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
The Asus Xonar DS is a PCI card that does DTS: Connect, but it doesn't do DDL, and the Xonar D1 does DDL but not DTS. So you can pick which one you prefer.
 
Most of the Xonar lineup do either Dts or DD with stock drivers. The upper shelf cards can do both.

Unless you're running sli or cfx, you can put an x1 card in your spare x16 slot.
 
I forgot to mention that I connect my sound card to the A/V unit using an optical (tosslink) cable. So obviously the card has to have the optical output.
 
Cannibal Corpse said:
I forgot to mention that I connect my sound card to the A/V unit using an optical (tosslink) cable. So obviously the card has to have the optical output.
Click to expand...

Sry, I was at work earlier on my phone, and missed a few things:

You may be wanting to spend money needlessly.

Your motherboard has TOSLINK/SPDIF ports on it for you to use. So long as the media you are working with is already DD or DTS as DVDs are, you should be able to send DTS/DD to your A/V unit that way. Many motherboards send data however it is pre-encoded. Course, media not pre-bitsetreamed DD/DTS will only cause the Realtek to broadcast PCM which is bandwidth limited to stereo over TOSLINK/SPDIF.

**Another path to consider. Your motherboard has HDMI. If your A/V reciever takes HDMI input, you may be able to work with full uncompressed PCM in 7.1 without any need for DD or DTS. This of course depends on the abilities of your A/V unit and what your motherboard does...I presume it can send audio over HDMI. :confused:

BTW- a PCIe slot is a PCIe slot. You could file off the end of an X1 slot and put a x16GPU in it. It would be bottlenecked mind you, but it would work. Same dealio, an X1 card should work fine in an x16 slot.
 
Skripka said:
Sry, I was at work earlier on my phone, and missed a few things:

You may be wanting to spend money needlessly.

Your motherboard has TOSLINK/SPDIF ports on it for you to use. So long as the media you are working with is already DD or DTS as DVDs are, you should be able to send DTS/DD to your A/V unit that way. Many motherboards send data however it is pre-encoded. Course, media not pre-bitsetreamed DD/DTS will only cause the Realtek to broadcast PCM which is bandwidth limited to stereo over TOSLINK/SPDIF.

**Another path to consider. Your motherboard has HDMI. If your A/V reciever takes HDMI input, you may be able to work with full uncompressed PCM in 7.1 without any need for DD or DTS. This of course depends on the abilities of your A/V unit and what your motherboard does...I presume it can send audio over HDMI. :confused:

BTW- a PCIe slot is a PCIe slot. You could file off the end of an X1 slot and put a x16GPU in it. It would be bottlenecked mind you, but it would work. Same dealio, an X1 card should work fine in an x16 slot.
Click to expand...

with DDL or DTS Connect...

Basically, its a hardware codec way of encoding a 'non encoded' Two or Multi channel audio stream into a DD or DTS stream OVER TOSLink / Optical. While most movies already send an encoded DD / DTS signal, most (if not all) games do not. This causes an issue with people who have a NICE Receiver/DAC and want to play games, because without DDL/DTS connect, you only receive a PCM 2 Channel signal, not an encoded signal.
 
OP, if you're looking for just your movies / tv shows to be sent to your DAC in DD or DTS, it's typically just a setting within VLC or your other media player. DD and DTS do work fine over HDMI or Optical without DDL / DTS Connect.
 
Some comments from couple of years ago regarding my inquiry about X-Fi PCIe:

"Many of the most widely advertised features of Creative's sound cards are purely software-based. This includes the much-vaunted Dolby Digital Live!, which encodes the audio from any program into a Dolby Digital bit-stream to be sent via optical S/PDIF to a surround-sound speaker system with a decoder. While other X-Fi cards support up to 7.1 speaker setups, the audio these cards produce is merely upmixed and not truly separated, and therefore isn't really clean, positional surround sound. However, remember that you'll need a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup, a Dolby Digital Live! decoder and an optical cable to use Dolby"

is this true? Then which card has a clean, true DD live then?:rolleyes:
 
I'm not sure what that quote is talking about, but the Asus cards, at least, do a good job with DDL and DTS:C.
 
djgizmo said:
with DDL or DTS Connect...

Basically, its a hardware codec way of encoding a 'non encoded' Two or Multi channel audio stream into a DD or DTS stream OVER TOSLink / Optical. While most movies already send an encoded DD / DTS signal, most (if not all) games do not. This causes an issue with people who have a NICE Receiver/DAC and want to play games, because without DDL/DTS connect, you only receive a PCM 2 Channel signal, not an encoded signal.
Click to expand...

True on all counts. But the OP said he was building an HTPC, not necessarily a gamer rig. Hence the query.
 
Look into using HDMI if your receiver supports it, it's far superior to S/PDIF for a 6 channel audio signal.
 
My AV unit supports HDMI (Sony DH-810) but I have always used Optical, using DD or DTS, even in normal Windows operations (besides launching a movie, DVD, or a source on the hard drive that has encoded DD, DTS) in other words the Sony's DD/DTS blue light, decoding these signals have always been lit up!
 
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Thanks, I will look into it. One question: does it matter if the interface is PCI or PCIe (as far as performance, communication speed, etc.)?
 
xfi prelude has optical + all that you're asking for but is discontinued, maybe pick up one on the cheap used?
 
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