Hi,

I have a HTPC setup passing audio through a Denon Surround reciever and Totem speakers. I have an old
Zoltrix Nightingale PRO 6 Sound Card with optical out and it is pretty good.

Questions:

1) Will there be an advantage to upgrade
2) Im looking at the Creative X-Fi Platinum or the M-Audio Audiophile 192 any comments or suggestions?

I use the rig mainly for audio, but I do think I may use it for movies etc in the future so I want some exapandability to 7.1. Coax or Optical out is a must.


Thanks in advance.

If you are using optical out and getting bit-perfect output keep it untill you need more channels; then see what digital formats are available then.

So there wont be any "sound" advantage to getting a more modern card? I guess that there should be no advantage if there is no proscessing...

I would go with M-Audio. Distance yourself as far away from Creative as possible. I am not sure if the Audiophile 192 has an optical output. If your mainly going to use it for Audio and Movies that's what I would do at least. Most DVD aren't mixed in 7.1 either. It's very rare. Mostly 5.1 or 6.1 DTS ES. The new HD-DVD is specification, however is lossless at least DTS-HD is. DVD-A is LPCM or MLP. You would need seperate hardware decoder for that. The 192 is also the only sound card that I know of that has a 64-bit driver support for future applications that might use it.

What's best for multichannel will depend on how your receiver/amplifier works in the future. Some receivers/amplifiers will be best with digital in; others with analog; with others it doesn't matter. It depends on how they work and how good the dacs are in them. If analog transmission is best, then if you rule out 1/8" connectors you are only left with a few soundcards which are good but not dirt cheap.
Digital transmission of multichannel I don't know much about. I know SPDIF is stereo only. HDMI can take audio but there aren't any current soundcards which give that. There is DD or DTS transfer or something like that; I don't know how easy it is to go about encoding into this or whether it is a lossless encoding.

Thanks for the info.

1) The M-Audio site says "digital I/O supports surround-encoded AC-3 and DTS pass-through", which, I assume, means that the 7.1/5.1 is passed through the digital-out ports to my decoder, since the card itself doesnt have the typical 1/8" connectors (ront/rear/sub etc)

2) Why do you suggest I stay far away from Creative?

Thanks for the opinions

1. ) Yes, that's correct. CSMR was right on his assertion that most soundcards don't support HDMI interface. It's High Definition Multimedia Interface used for the new HD standard .
2. ) I don't like the way they treat the consumer. I also don't think too highly of the fact that they monopolize the consumer audio market, personally but that's just me.

So does the X-fi You can set options to let applications stream DTS/AC3 signals directly to external processor when such are detected - It's however also able to just decode it