Best stereo soundcard for HTPC?

i do not think any of these cards have hardware dolby/dts decoder to process 01. channel if that is what you mean. Nevertheless if you have a full version of PowerDVD this will decode dolby and if you have nice stereo monitors that are able to reproduce the bass, they will. Obvious question: why would you want stereo card in HTPC system? Current surround soundcards are top quality anyway...
EDIT: Just saw you have a separate sub. I do not think you can send LFE to this sub using any analog outputs of the card. You need either surround soundcard or separate decoder
 
I know that some dvd-players can reroute LFE to stereo-output. This requires x.1 sound card?

My plan is to connect both speakers and sub with speaker cable and use just one rca-cable betweeen HTPC and Arcam A90.
 
diva A90 is an analog amp, right? So if you want to connect it using stereo pair of RCA cables dvd app should re-route LFE to stereo outputs of the card. For this setup you do not need x.1sound card. If you wanted to connect an active sub directly to the sound card's o/p you would need x.1 sound card. With all cards listed decoding Dolby will be offloaded to CPU as they do not have dolby decoding implemented in hardware, just something to keep in mind.
 
Yep A90 is analog stereo amp with only stereo inputs. Bass redirect is the correct term that I ment in the first post. LFE is redirected to front output. Now that I've done some research it seems that it can be done with any soundcard by software.

I think I'm getting ESI Juli@.
 
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