It seems that a lot of people on this board fully endorse the Xonar (or what ever it is called) sound card even though its high price. They sight its high DAC rating as a justification to buy it. I recently bought a cheap Rocketfish sound card from Best Buy. It has an Audigy chip on it and optical out. I doubt the DAC chip is very good but I bought it for the digital output in which case, the rating of the DAC does not matter at all.
Currently I have the optical output from my card running to a Denon 1910 receiver (which I am sure has decent DAC chips). All this concern with quality of DAC chips on sound cards make me wonder, am I losing quality in the conversion to digital? I think all 5.1 encoding is compressed however I am using 2 channel in which case I think it is transmitted in PCM (which I always thought was lossless RAW data). Am I correct? If so, why is everyone so concerned with onboard DAC quality on their soundcards?
Currently I have the optical output from my card running to a Denon 1910 receiver (which I am sure has decent DAC chips). All this concern with quality of DAC chips on sound cards make me wonder, am I losing quality in the conversion to digital? I think all 5.1 encoding is compressed however I am using 2 channel in which case I think it is transmitted in PCM (which I always thought was lossless RAW data). Am I correct? If so, why is everyone so concerned with onboard DAC quality on their soundcards?