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s/pdif v standard cables

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wayneennis1000

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Joined
Mar 26, 2016
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I have bought a set of 5.1 speakers. They are connected to an Asus Essence STX II sound card. I have 3 ways of connecting the speakers

1) Standard green, black and orange cables

2) Via s/pdif and choosing Dolby Digital Live

3) Via s/pdif and chossing PCM

Which one will be my best option out of the 3 of them? I play PC games, watch movies and listen to music.
 
Depends on the capabilities of the speakers in many cases.

Option #1 would present the speakers with an analog signal. As long as it's not reconverting it into digital for some kind of processing at the speakers then this would probably be the best option as then your soundcard is doing all of the work.

Option #2 can work, but sometimes creates delay which can be very bad for gaming. Also this is a lossy compression, like compressing into MP3 on the fly. Content already encoded via Dolby or DTS (Movies, etc) will likely be passed unconverted and work fine.

Option #3 is either your best option or your 2nd best option. You are limited to 2 channel while gaming, etc, with this config, but if the source is only 2 channels then that can be fine. Content already encoded via Dolby or DTS (Movies, etc) will likely be passed unconverted and work fine.


Option #1 vs 3 comes down to if the speakers are reconverting the input signal back into digital for additional processing. If they don't, then you might as well just feed them an analog signal (Option #1), otherwise, if it's going to convert it into digital anyway, Option #3 would be best. It also comes down to which DAC is better. If you feed your speakers an analog signal, your sound card's DAC is doing the digital to analog conversion. If you feed your speakers a digital signal, then you are using the DAC in your speakers. That could potentially be a big deal for music if you prefer one DAC over the other.

Also, there shouldn't be any reason why you can't have analog and digital cables hooked up simultaneously, switching back and forth between each depending on content. In that case you could pretty much just leave it on digital (Option #3) 98% of the time, switching to analog (Option #1) for those very few times when you have a surround source that isn't already Dolby Digital or DTS, which are really the only times it would be down-converted to 2 channel.
 
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