motherboard sound vs. xfi

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tony8404

Weaksauce
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Mar 28, 2007
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i have a dfi lanparty cfx-3200 dr, which has the built in karajan 8.0 channel sound... i have not used it yet i used my old audigy 2zs and now i use my xfi fatality extreme gamer pro card... i still have yet to get a receiver to go digital but i was wondering about the karajan audio that is built into the board... is that better then the xfi?? does the karajan audio have digital decoding built in for going digital?? or should i just get the receiver?
 
For Quality, this is subjective depending on what you listen for and what hifi system you are using.
How well the hifi is set up can make a big difference too.

For gaming in XP (and Vista with OpenAL games), the X-Fi supports more EAX modes so will give you better surround sound support.

Neither the onboard sound nor the X-Fi will give you 5.1 sound through digital unless you are using pass through while playing back a DVD or pre-encoded 5.1 content in Dolby Digital/DTS format.
Windows sound and gaming will only be in stereo using the digital connection.
 
this is so darn confusing.... so if i take my onboard sound which has spdif which is digital right? so if i take a receiver that does dolby all i have to do is connect from the mother board sound to the receiver then connect the speakers to the receiver???? can i do the same thing with my xfi card?
 
tony8404 said:
this is so darn confusing.... so if i take my onboard sound which has spdif which is digital right? so if i take a receiver that does dolby all i have to do is connect from the mother board sound to the receiver then connect the speakers to the receiver???? can i do the same thing with my xfi card?
Click to expand...

Yes and yes but Creative makes it incredibly hard to do. Not to mention that if you're going digital out (SPDIF out) to a receiver the Xfi and onboard are about equal do to the fact that the whole point to an Xfi is it's better DACs which are only used when going analog out.

Anyways, do use digital out on a Creative card you need to get a 3.5mm to spdif adapter from, like, Radioshack and then hope that you can turn on digital out in the control panel (some drivers seem not to have it enabled so you might have to downgrade the drivers). Either way Creative makes it a process, a PITA process that gets you nothing over using the onboard sound's digital out.
 
If you're doing digital out to a receiver, then use the onboard sound. Because it's digital the sound quality is a function of the digital to analog conversion on the receiver, therefore the source is technically irrelevant. So save yourself the trouble of the xifi.
 
Its easy to turn the flex jack to do spdif out, you just need the adapter cable (monoprice.com)? But the real question is what are you trying to get out to your receiver? If you are watching dvd, blue ray, ect... then the audio stream is passed over the digital cable (toslink optical or the spdif ) to the receiver, then the receiver decodes the signal and pumps it to the correct channels.

Now if you are listening to mp3s, only 2 channel stereo will be passed over what ever cable you hook up, unless your soundcard's utility has some form of matrixing the sound to all the channels.

Also with the xfi or the onboard you can do the 6 channel analog to the receiver if it is supported, this will most likely favor the quality to the xfi, as everything is analog and the sound card is doing the decoding rather than the receiver.


I hope this helps a little.
 
wow didnt think anyone was going to answer back.... well, here is my deal, i only game on the pc, i watch movies on the tv. so with that said... i just feel right now with my xfi card and my logitech 5300 speakers i feel i am missing something from what i have... so since i bought all this stuff i wanna make sure i am using full potential.

so i thought that if i was to take either my onboard sound which is karajan on my dfi cfx-3200 or my xfi fatality 1 pro gamer i could buy a 5.1 receiver and connect either xfi or onboard sound to the receiver and plug my speakers to the receiver and then i would get digital or better sound then just the xfi or onboard sound just hooked up in the pc with my logitech 5300 speaker... would this be true? or would i get the same quality either way?

also, if this would work for me can anyone suggest a decent receiver or a basic one to start with due to low funds? i am just not sure which to go with i have seen a couple and they say dolby digital 2 or pro logic ect..ect.. but doesnt say digital decoder
 
Theres no point in you using a 5.1 sound system if you connect it via digital.
 
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