2 soundcards at once?

[MetalDwarf]

My computer and Home Theatre are in the same room i use the same speakers and amplifiers for both TV/DVD/Wii and Computer

i play a lot of music with the computer and regular computer audio stuff youtube, blah blah blah over the computer. thing is my computer sits 90 degrees counterclockwise to the TV and front speakers.

in otherwords if you are looking at the tv the computer is on the wall directly to your left. and vise versa for the computer. this means if im playing a games or something that requires directional audio from the computer the speaker directly to my right is actually the front left channel and the speaker to my left is the rear left channel. which gets mighty confusing when playing games (which i dont do too much of so it hasent bothered me too much)

but im wondering if i got this card would i still be able to use my onboard soundcard aswell. the x-plosion would be running off toslink so it would connect to the speakers in the same mannor as the TV (front left is front left, front right is front right etc.) could i then run analog outs from my onboard (or a x-fi? for games) but connect to the discrete inputs on my reciver but rotated 90 degrees?

basicaly what this boils down to is can i output the same audio from two soundcards installs at the same time? or can i only use one?

 

[alg7_munif]

I use 2 sound cards in my system without any problem but I need to change the prefered device in control panel each time I want to use one card or the other. I think that your X-Plosion has the Virtual speaker shifter feature that can be used to "turn" the speakers around, haven't tried it though.

 

[rblews]

I'm about to buy the X-Merridian as my second card for the music (analog/DAC/headphones); and, hope to be able to continue to use the X-Fi for gaming. Will let you know if I find any conflicts.

 

[FiZ]

I personally use two sound cards. I use my X-Fi for gaming and another card specifically for music (has an unamped analog output). It works great and the only issues I have come across is poor drivers for the music card.

 

[MetalDwarf]

but I need to change the prefered device in control panel each time I want to use one card or the other.

yeah thats kinda my question

so are you saying when you first set up a program you have to tell just the program what card to use or do you have to go to control panel and turn one on and the other off?
or will they play nice and both output the same stuff at the same time?

in the video world you can "mirror" your desktop on 2 monitors

i kinda just wanna "mirror" my audio across 2 sound cards

 

[Zepher]

yeah thats kinda my question

so are you saying when you first set up a program you have to tell just the program what card to use or do you have to go to control panel and turn one on and the other off?
or will they play nice and both output the same stuff at the same time?

in the video world you can "mirror" your desktop on 2 monitors

i kinda just wanna "mirror" my audio across 2 sound cards

I made a shortcut to Sound and Devices so I could change quickly. I do know that you can have 2 programs playing at the same time and one using one device and the other program use the other device, but I can't figure out how to get one program to send out to both at the same time. It's most likely a windows limitation.

 

[alg7_munif]

yeah thats kinda my question

so are you saying when you first set up a program you have to tell just the program what card to use or do you have to go to control panel and turn one on and the other off?
or will they play nice and both output the same stuff at the same time?

in the video world you can "mirror" your desktop on 2 monitors

i kinda just wanna "mirror" my audio across 2 sound cards

I can set winamp to always use my X-Meridian eventhough the prefered windows' card is my X-Fi. I connect my X-Fi SPDIF output to my X-Meridian SPDIF input, if I enable the SPDIF input monitoring on my X-Meridian, I can get both cards to play the same sound. Normally programs will use the prefered device but you can choose the device in some programs. I don't think that in a normal situation you can get the same sound from two different cards.

 

[MetalDwarf]

so it doesnt seem that i would be able to Mirror the sound cards like i would have hoped.

I connect my X-Fi SPDIF output to my X-Meridian SPDIF input,

is there any latency problems with this. most spdif stuff ive played with in the pro audio recording has some inherent latency. in music and movies it might not be too noticeable but i imagin in a game it could get very annoying if the latency got up to 30ms.

does the x-fi spdif output work well with the x-meridian? can the xmeridian still do "its thing" with the DTS and DDL coming from the spdif in?

 

[alg7_munif]

Just played CS 1.6 with this setup and didn't notice any latency issue. The X-Meridian can still encode DD/DTS from SPDIF in but anything coming from SPDIF in is still stereo not a surround sound.