USB headphones + dedicated sound card.

D

DisrupTer911

[H]ard|Gawd
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Say you wanted to run something like the Corsair HS1 USB 5.1 headset.
but you have a dedicated sound card like the Titanium HD.

the soundcard has Mic, Stereo 3.5mm, RCAs, and toslinks.

Can you use the HS1 w/ the soundcard providing the processing but outputting through the usb dongle so the 5.1 works?
 
The USB headset does all the sound processing, your Titanium HD would provide NO benefit.

Check out the review we released today of the analog version of the Corsair HS1, the Corsair HS1A headset . We used it extensively with the Titanium HD. CMSS-3d provided excellent upmixing and positional audio.
 
USB headsets just have incredibly cheap DACs and weak amplifiers inside them. The same components that come in a sound card.
 
5.1 can only be done via a analog connection.
the only way to get rich 5.1 surround out of PC games was to run 6 analogue cables into the 5.1 multi-channel inputs of a home theater receiver
many sound cards on the market can pass Dolby Digital and DTS "raw" signals for decoding by the receiver, most EAX/A3D surround games are only able to be output via the sound card's analogue outputs.
 
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Spooony said:
5.1 can only be done via a analog connection.
the only way to get rich 5.1 surround out of PC games was to run 6 analogue cables into the 5.1 multi-channel inputs of a home theater receiver
many sound cards on the market can pass Dolby Digital and DTS "raw" signals for decoding by the receiver, most EAX/A3D surround games are only able to be output via the sound card's analogue outputs.
Click to expand...

1. 5.1 can be done via HDMI and optical/coaxial S/PDIF as well
2. Most new soundcards can do DD/DTS encoding and can then pass it off to the receiver for 5.1 via S/PDIF.
 
S/PDIF transports audio in several different common ways from PC to receiver:
1. 2.0-channel uncompressed PCM audio from PC audio output.
2. 5.1-channel compressed Dolby Digital (AC-3) or DTS audio from audio files of those formats (the AC-3 audio track on your DVD).
3. 5.1-channel compressed Dolby Digital (AC-3) or DTS audio mixed in real-time via Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect from multichannel PC audio output (EAX, A3D, DirectSound, whatever).

What S/PDIF can NOT transport (not enough bandwidth) is uncompressed >2-channel PCM audio.
 
havermeyer said:
S/PDIF transports audio in several different common ways from PC to receiver:
1. 2.0-channel uncompressed PCM audio from PC audio output.
2. 5.1-channel compressed Dolby Digital (AC-3) or DTS audio from audio files of those formats (the AC-3 audio track on your DVD).
3. 5.1-channel compressed Dolby Digital (AC-3) or DTS audio mixed in real-time via Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect from multichannel PC audio output (EAX, A3D, DirectSound, whatever).

What S/PDIF can NOT transport (not enough bandwidth) is uncompressed >2-channel PCM audio.
Click to expand...

To sum up- the spdif - Sony phillips digital is designed to carry digital data so that some device can process it and then play sound. For example, a dvd player will have the receiver do the 5.1 sound and or if you hook it up the x-fi then the x-fi will decode the sound.

The X-fi doesnt use dolby digital or dts when you play games. It uses EAX which is its own kind of surround sound. As such if you want to use eax or cmss3d you need to use your recievers multi-channel input to get the benefits. Thats analog

S/PDIF won't compress anything - it's a protocol and data format for sending digital audio. The issue is that s/pdif is limited to 16 bit/48 kHz 2 channel PCM (because PCM is uncompressed). DD/DTS are compressed audio formats so that although there are 5.1 channels of audio the total amount of data that is being sent is less than the max s/pdif can transport. The bandwidth of HDMI is much greater and can carry multi-channel PCM (as well as video at the same time).

For your direct sound
Windows Vista features a completely re-written audio stack based on the Universal Audio Architecture. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist.[1] DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It's likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
 
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S/PDIF does do surround just fine, research it. It does use compression algorithms.

Spooony said:
To sum up- the spdif - Sony phillips digital is designed to carry digital data so that some device can process it and then play sound. For example, a dvd player will have the receiver do the 5.1 sound and or if you hook it up the x-fi then the x-fi will decode the sound.

The X-fi doesnt use dolby digital or dts when you play games. It uses EAX which is its own kind of surround sound. As such if you want to use eax or cmss3d you need to use your recievers multi-channel input to get the benefits. Thats analog

S/PDIF won't compress anything - it's a protocol and data format for sending digital audio. The issue is that s/pdif is limited to 16 bit/48 kHz 2 channel PCM (because PCM is uncompressed). DD/DTS are compressed audio formats so that although there are 5.1 channels of audio the total amount of data that is being sent is less than the max s/pdif can transport. The bandwidth of HDMI is much greater and can carry multi-channel PCM (as well as video at the same time).

For your direct sound
Windows Vista features a completely re-written audio stack based on the Universal Audio Architecture. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist.[1] DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It's likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
Click to expand...
 
Spooony said:
To sum up- the spdif - Sony phillips digital
Click to expand...

You mean Sony Phillips Digital InterFace? And yes, spdif can't do 5.1... Thats why on this 5.1 setup with the spidif connection to the receiver that i'm confused that theres different sound coming out the LR than the rear...weird. :p

Theres digital cables that are used in the studio that send 8 ins and 8 outs digitally (TDIF). HDMI will also do 8 channels, 192 kHz. Analog can never ever send a signal without degradation, so noone can claim it's ever sent "lossless". Analog is a crappy way of sending a signal you want unchanged.
 
Spooony said:
The X-fi doesnt use dolby digital or dts when you play games. It uses EAX which is its own kind of surround sound.
Click to expand...
The X-Fi card uses whatever form of audio is fed to it by the game. Some games can send 5.1 audio through SPDIF.
 
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