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Does a sound card matter if you're using optical
- Thread starter darkeen
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Optical doesn't have the bandwidth for Dolby True HD or DTS HD.
The main advantage of a nice sound card for optical is that it will probably support Dolby Digital Live (DDL) or the DTS equivalent, while your average onboard sound card probably won't come with this feature.
DDL is important because most games aren't encoded in the compress audio format that Optical uses for 5.1 audio. So without DDL you'll only get stereo over optical. DDL transcodes the game audio to DD on the fly to give you 5.1 audio.
The main advantage of a nice sound card for optical is that it will probably support Dolby Digital Live (DDL) or the DTS equivalent, while your average onboard sound card probably won't come with this feature.
DDL is important because most games aren't encoded in the compress audio format that Optical uses for 5.1 audio. So without DDL you'll only get stereo over optical. DDL transcodes the game audio to DD on the fly to give you 5.1 audio.
dolby True HD is BD content. So its protected right? So it will be downsampled to 16bit correct?
I'm not sure what you mean?
PAP
Without PAP, audio from every AACS-encrypted content will be downsampled to 16 bit, 48 kHz
Protected Audio Path (PAP) is essential for full resolution audio, without which audio from every AACS-encrypted content will be downsampled to 16bit/48kHz. PAP is also necessary for Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HS Master Audio bitstreams
No way you'll get True HD /Dts-Hs over optical. You need Hdmi otherwise its downsampled. The Radeon 5450 on the other hand can play it without downsampling it.
Ah right, never knew that.
But if you were using your PC as HTPC for blurays that would be fine right? (talking about the beautiful Xonar HDAV 1.3 card i love) Or is there some reason PAP isn't available for HTPC solutions that would utterly stupid/fuck annoying..
I know you cant get it over optical, like i said before. I have a habit of scanning over posts in here and when i see coax/optical/HDMI i just read "digital" for some reason.
You need to pass the TrueHD via HDMI to a receiver that can decode it. The Xonar HDAV only performs passthrough of these tracks, same as most modern video cards do. In this application, there is no benefit to a high end sound card like that, my $30 Nvidia 210 card in my HTPC will do this, as well as decoding the video. It really comes down to having a modern receiver that will accept HDMI and decode TrueHD.
Optical (TOSLINK) indeed has the bandwidth to support the new lossless codecs. It supports up to 125 Mbps now. It's just that no PC hardware manufacturers are interested in using newly-spec'd stuff because people would rather use HDMI. There are plenty of idiots out there claiming they hear a difference in their digital transport medium, but they are morons. A 1 is a 1 and a 0 is a 0. As long as they are making it from the source to the destination there will be perfect sound reproduction. If bits miss then the sound corrupts and completely drops out until the signal is back in synch.
twelveparsex
[H]F Junkie
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Dolby true he and dts require hdmi
The Xonar HDAV can decode TrueHD and output as analogue if you wish too.
But aye, at the end of the day it depends on what system you're running and what you want out of it. If you can decode TrueHD and this is a HTPC then i'd go for a HDMI pass-through option.
If this is not a HTPC or just not running bluray then stick to your on board optical.
Either way, let your receiver do the work.
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The only thing possibly using an X-Fi will buy you is CPU offloading for positional sound calculations, etc. However the sound quality will be exactly the same and be 100% determined by whatever equipment you're terminating the singal into.
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