Soundcard digital pathways?, If you skip the DAC are they 'perfect'? Options

[puntloos]

I was wondering,

If you use a soundcard's digital out and tell it not to equalize/eax/otherprocessing, is the digital quality 'perfect'?

Case in point I have a professional DSP hooked up to my SB audigy's digital out. If I were to upgrade the audigy (not that I have the $$$ but for argument's sake ), would I get any improvement in the sound quality of my mpc audio playback?

Basically I hear some 'stories' from people that say 'yes' to the last question but I find it hard to believe that the digital ".wav" data from winamp would get distorted by the sound card that's hooked up to it. provided of course I don't use the onboard DAC's or some hardware DSP feature like resampling or spatialisation crap, but Im telling my computer to have all EQ's off and just play back the file.

Anyone know the answer here?

[odyssey]

Then what happens if you have a bit-perfect stream which uses the full range and another stream starts to play at the same time?

Just checked - My X-fi/Windows seems to be stuck at 44Khz no matter what I play now in "Bit-matched Playback"-mode Even with Kernel streaming plugin.

(Which is that is not compatible with what odyssey said.)

I put the sig up at easter and haven't got round to changing it.

I did not say that you can play multiple streams with different sample rates at the same time, I said (like I'm having some trouble with now) that Bitmatched Playback does not disallow other streams like DTS/DD etc to be sent to external reciever.

[coburn_c]

Just checked - My X-fi/Windows seems to be stuck at 44Khz no matter what I play now in "Bit-matched Playback"-mode Even with Kernel streaming plugin.

Yeah, mine screws up a lot when I actually, you know.. use it. Usually a reboot fixes it.

I did not say that you can play multiple streams with different sample rates at the same time, I said (like I'm having some trouble with now) that Bitmatched Playback does not disallow other streams like DTS/DD etc to be sent to external reciever.

I'm pretty sure I can't output an ac3/DD/DTS stream and a pcm stream at the same time. And what are these 'other' streams any way? The whole point of bitmatching is to get a bit identicle output, why would it disallow DD/DTS? I needed bit matched playback to play DTS CDs.. You're very confusing...

[odyssey]

I'm pretty sure I can't output an ac3/DD/DTS stream and a pcm stream at the same time. And what are these 'other' streams any way? The whole point of bitmatching is to get a bit identicle output, why would it disallow DD/DTS? I needed bit matched playback to play DTS CDs.. You're very confusing...

Umm maybe, but without Bitmatched playback, DD/DTS are still sent to the reciever - One could wonder, why it would not be bit-identical without that setting then. Actually by "other streams" I meant streams with different sample rate, but while the stream does not break apart when playing content with different samplerates in Bit-matched playback, it makes the feature quite untrusty.

I'm on deep water now Need more testing... or maybe just better drivers.