Best Sound Card w/ Coax Out? Around $150 or Less

WhiteZero

WhiteZero

2[H]4U
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Oct 21, 2004
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I recently upgraded my speakers to the Logitech Z-5500, which I'm quite happy with. I've occupied the Optical In with my Xbox 360 and right now I have my aging SoudnBlaster Audigy 2 Value running to the speakers with direct analog cables.

I'd kind of link to upgrade my sound card to something with Coax to run to my speakers, making the most of them. Any recommendations?

I see that a fellow [H]'er is selling his Auzen X-Fi Predule 7.1 here on the forums for a very good price. But I've heard they have pretty bad driver support for the card right now... :confused:
 
Gaming? The Prelude is a good deal. Especially if used. Every card has bad driver support lol.

Major issue is that the prelude has optical out only I believe? It has those weird adapters for optical out.

An X-Fi can have coax output if you purchase an aftermarket 1/8th to coax cable. You will lose your microphone input however.
 
spaceman said:
Gaming? The Prelude is a good deal. Especially if used. Every card has bad driver support lol.

Major issue is that the prelude has optical out only I believe? It has those weird adapters for optical out.

An X-Fi can have coax output if you purchase an aftermarket 1/8th to coax cable. You will lose your microphone input however.
Click to expand...

The Prelude has Coax in and out with a TOSLINK (optical) adapter.


Also, I just did about a half hour of Googling and found that apparently the Prelude is much better used with the analog out rather than digital (coax or optical); espcially with my speaker setup, since apparently the Prelude has better DAC's than the Z5500.

So really, me wanting to use Coax so bad is probably pointless since a decent sound card has better decoding components.
 
Does your Audigy card have Creative's minijack digital output? If it does, you can use a regular 1/8" to RCA mono cable (a few dollars from a place like Radio Shack) to output PCM stereo audio and AC3 passthrough from the card.
 
If you're going for a card with SPIDF out, then make sure it has either Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect to be able to encode all your audio sources to full 5.1/multi-channel sound. That's the main thing to look for. If you don't have this, only movies and other sound sources that are specifically encoded in Dolby or DTS will give you more than stereo sound over your SPDIF digital connection.
 
The audigy valkue has a SPDIF out im sure, u need a standard rca cable to use it. Just connect to the port lablled digitall out on your sound card and use the while (left) channel of the rca cable and connect that to your receiver.

This is true for all sound cards with a 1/8th coax slot. Also as coax is a digital sigan you dont need to worrk about the cable quality or annything! Anny old RCA cable will work, you dont need to spend loads on a cable from creative when you wont get any difference!
 
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