Asus Z370-E Audio Confusion

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Wolf-R1

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 30, 2004
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Just upgraded my PC from a system that had an SB X-Fi Titanium connected to an Onkyo receiver via optical cable. The new system is an Asus ROG Strix Z370-E board with onboard audio that's got an optical out connection using the same cable to the same receiver. On the old system the Onkyo constantly showed it was in DTS mode (little red icon). With the new system the Onkyo shows PCM unless I've told it to test DTS via the control panel app but otherwise is constantly in PCM mode.

I had previously assumed that I would have similar abilities to control and test how the new system works but have been mistaken. The Sonic Studio 3 app that installs with the audio drivers doesn't really do anything to force DTS sound. The only test facility that I seem to have available to me is the Sonic Radar app that says it's testing 7.1 sound but the receiver never goes into DTS or DD mode. It just stays in PCM.

Suggestions? Did I assume wrong that onboard audio would give me DTS surround? Should I go back to a discreet audio card? Or does anyone have any ideas how to test whether or not other software will actually use DTS sound?
 
What I'm starting to figure out via all this reading I've been doing is that the sound card appears to need to support DTS Connect (DTS Neo: PC) in order to do what I'm wanting it to do. With that DTS spec everything gets encoded to up to 7.1 audio channels. So while this board's onboard audio does support DTS technically I suspect that it won't use it unless something like a movie specifically requests it, unlike something like a discrete sound card such as many Sound Blaster cards that will force multi channel sound down the pipe if told to do so.

So I guess this question actually becomes: who's got the better sound cards these days? I don't need high end DACs or anything like that on a card since I'll be using the TOSLink cable to send it to my receiver.
 
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There's DD:Live! and DTS:Connect- and it took me a while to remember these, because no one actually uses them on purpose these days when you can just use HDMI, generally speaking, and skip the lossy compression.

But those two allow on-the-fly encoding of surround-sound. Anything else is just a passthrough. And Dolby stuff in games doesn't count either, as that's a Dolby HRTF technology that's outputting to the system audio, and what you need is something that takes that output and encodes and compresses for transport across a digital audio connection like TOSLINK.
 
Well I've got this connected via Display Port and this receiver doesn't have that connector. I'm thinking I'm going to have to go with something that supports DTS Connect out via TOSLink. Now it's just trying to figure out what since I don't need DACs and a lot of the expense of sound cards is the added hardware. The Soundblaster Z series looks to be the best so far. Not sure I need the ZxR or even the Zx if all three of them are based on the same Sound Core 3D processor.
 
I'm also reading that DTS Connect used to be there but after a certain build of Windows 10 it's non existent for some reason. On the Z370 with SupremeFX S1220A sound that is...
 
Wolf-R1 said:
I'm also reading that DTS Connect used to be there but after a certain build of Windows 10 it's non existent for some reason. On the Z370 with SupremeFX S1220A sound that is...
Click to expand...

I ran into this problem as well. While Windows 10 seems to be the main issue, I think (although please don't hold me to this) that ASUS is the culprit. In researching message boards, other manufacturers have released drivers to bring back the DTS Connect functionality that was lost in a recent Win10 upgrade. ASUS, however, has not. In fact, the latest driver for my board (Maximus Ranger VIII) has a text box specifically noting that the DTS Connect only works with certain Windows10 builds and prior.

I noticed that the new ASUS boards and even the new SoundBlast AE-5 do not reference DTS Connect or Dolby Digital Live. On Amazon, one of the reviews for the SoundBlaster AE-5 makes reference to an inquiry to Creative Labs wherein CL said that they are no longer supporting that functionality.

The audiophiles on this message board have helped me tremendously to figure this out, and it makes sense. The DTS Connect, which is encoding realtime is gone, but for a pure DTS signal, the optical can still pass it through - which is why my receiver lights up "DTS" when watching a movie on the Netflix app, but I still do not have the DTS Connect feature.

(pardon any irregularities with nomenclature...)
 
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