I am looking for advice on whether to move forward with an external DAC, replacing my Titanium X-Fi internal card. The primary purpose is for a significant increase in the quality of the audio for music, which I feel pretty confident will be achieved.
I could leave the sound card in the machine and switch between the two for music vs. gaming so as to not miss out on FPS positional sound queues, which I thought were the result of EAX or virtual Dolby being processed by the sound card. After reading here and other forums, I am not so sure that is the case. It seems that at least some of the games send a PCM stream to the audio card so that, and I am guessing here, the mixing is already done and the positional sound queues are ready for analog conversion into 2/2.1 or 4/4.1 output.
The games I play most are Crysis 2 and Just Cause 2. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. I plan to purchase a Benchmark DAC1 USB or plain DAC1 with a M2Tech SP/DIF to USB converter.
I could leave the sound card in the machine and switch between the two for music vs. gaming so as to not miss out on FPS positional sound queues, which I thought were the result of EAX or virtual Dolby being processed by the sound card. After reading here and other forums, I am not so sure that is the case. It seems that at least some of the games send a PCM stream to the audio card so that, and I am guessing here, the mixing is already done and the positional sound queues are ready for analog conversion into 2/2.1 or 4/4.1 output.
The games I play most are Crysis 2 and Just Cause 2. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. I plan to purchase a Benchmark DAC1 USB or plain DAC1 with a M2Tech SP/DIF to USB converter.