I recently ditched a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card and am trying to use my motherboard's built-in AC 97 ALC 850 sound interface instead.

With the Santa Cruz, the digital signal was always present on my Marantz SR4200 receiver, even if there was no sound actually playing.

With the ALC850, the soundcard seems to go into a sleep mode, and the PCM indicator on my Marantz Receiver is no longer illuminated. When a sound is played, it quickly tries to re-establish the connection, but generally is too late in doing so, and half the sound effect gets cut off. In the Sound Manager I am able to set the SPDIF to output both analog and digital, and the connection stays active even when idle, but I get a lot of extra noise from the analog signal which is not acceptable.

Has anyone had a similar problem? Sorry if i'm asking in the wrong place ... but I can't find anything about this problem anywhere!