Sound Cards with Optical Out

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BajaGringo

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Jun 6, 2008
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I have a large digital library - almost 100K songs. I have a Compaq server rack that I turned into an audio rack in my living room and two 350 GB hard drives with my music and backup. I want to interface the library to my rack mounted audio system using something other than the mini digital plug. Anybody here have experience with using an audio card with an optical out so I can interface it via optical to my Yamaha DSP?

Thanks

Ron
 
Just plug optical out from any sound card into your yamaha and it will just work like any other device. spdif is pretty standard, especially for 2 channel output.
 
Fryguy8 said:
Just plug optical out from any sound card into your yamaha and it will just work like any other device. spdif is pretty standard, especially for 2 channel output.
Click to expand...

Exactly. A cheapo $10 sound card will do the job exactly the same as a $100+ sound card when outputting an optical signal. The sound card is basically outputting raw data unless you have some EQ or environmental settings enabled.
 
well a soundcard doesn't output "raw" data, it takes the raw digital signal and transforms it to the spdif standard and output this via optical or coaxial out so a spdif compatible device could read the digital signal.

a better soundcard will improve the digital output over a onboard or cheap one.
but i think the difference will be marginal, it all depends on your equipment if you could hear the difference.

I'd say if you have a good system don't go cheap on the source.
 
No. This is wrong.

S/PDIF standard is just that, a standard. A sound card isn't going to do a better or worse job of it.

The absolute only consideration is jitter or clock skew. And this is a complete non-issue until you get into 10s of thousands of dollars of equipment. If you can hear jitter on lesser equipment, you are probably lying. If you aren't lying, then enjoy spending a couple thousand dollars on specially clocked systems from something like LessLoss.
 
hey, i wrote that you need decent equipment to profit from a better soundcards digital out.
but i think the threshold isn't as high as you wrote.

look, it seems that the op wants to be on the save side, so why not spend 100 bucks on a decent digital source, even if it's just for beeing on the save side or having headroom for future upgrades ?
 
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