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All Optical Outs Created Equal?

pigwalk

pigwalk

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I was wondering. I've been using a Revo 5.1 for a while now instead of my onboard RealTek ALC850 for about a year now. The difference in sound quality from the analog outs is astounding, you can tell the difference even on tiny low end speakers. But I was wondering, should there be a difference in sound quality between the 2 using the optical outs?

-wil
 
Yes and no. Most soundcards tend to resample all of your audio to 48kHz or 96kHz (CD audio is 44.1kHz, as are MP3s) even on the digital outputs. Depending on how well or how poorly they do the resampling affects your sound quality. Some new cards like the Creative X-Fi have "bit-matched" or "bit-perfect" output meaning that it does NOT resample the audio but sends it straight out as it recieves it, thus letting your receiver or speakers do 100% of the work. I'm PRETTY SURE that with bit-perfect playback all digital outputs are indeed created equal. Somone
 
I am going to have to disagree and tell you that not all optical outs are created equal.

If you're not using $1x,xxx stereo equipment, you should ALWAYS go with digital coaxial over optical.
 
Smitty2k1 said:
Yes and no. Most soundcards tend to resample all of your audio to 48kHz or 96kHz (CD audio is 44.1kHz, as are MP3s) even on the digital outputs. Depending on how well or how poorly they do the resampling affects your sound quality. Some new cards like the Creative X-Fi have "bit-matched" or "bit-perfect" output meaning that it does NOT resample the audio but sends it straight out as it recieves it, thus letting your receiver or speakers do 100% of the work. I'm PRETTY SURE that with bit-perfect playback all digital outputs are indeed created equal. Somone
Click to expand...

Jitter and precise clock are two things that come into play to differentiate between a good digital out and a poor digital out, I believe.
 
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