I bought an ASUS soundcard a few months ago to compliment my mp3 collection (I have been ripping all my CDs for the past year and a half), and am pretty happy with it. One of the options I get to choose from is PCM vs. Dolby. I stick with PCM, since I just have two speakers (and subwoofer). Inside the PCM options, I have 44.1, 48 and 96. Which should I choose? I would think the highest would be the best rate to choose, but when I first tried that option, it didn't sound as "full" as when I picked 48. I've adjusted some settings and now PCM sounds pretty good, but that just might be due to my ears liking something different from the settings I've had for the past month or so. My reciever even lights up "PCM 96" (I can't even choose the "loudness" feature or "dialogue enhancement" when this comes up) when I pick this option, so I would imagine this is the setting to keep it on?

Any help would be appreciated - I've tried googling it, but no luck so far. Again, this is for 99% music listening....every once in a while I may pop a DVD in, but by and large it's for my mp3s.

I think I was tinkering with the settings today because I was at my gfs house over the weekend, and was really frustrated, because while I was listening to a Smashing Pumpkins CD I made for her, a lot of the tracks sounded better on her $100 (and 100 watt) stereo system than on my system (which isn't spectacular, but head and shoulders above her stuff).

CD audio is 44.1, but there are some higher fidelity recordings (i.e. DVD-Audio, SACD) that make use of higher sample rates. For more info see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_rate

that's what I thought....I thought most CDs wouldn't be more than 44.1. Ironically, I was looking into my card and found that I didn't have an updated driver...so I updated, and one of the new features was to turn off the EQ junk on the soundcard....I did, and it sounds 100x better. I think the soundcard EQ was compressing things too much, because now even the "loud" CDs (that I replay gained to normal volume) don't sound nearly as bad. Smashing Pumpkins' Zeitgeist sounds good for the first time since I've owned it.

Between using Winamp's EQ, iZotope, and that, I think I just had too much going on. I re-did the EQ to compensate, and adjusted some other settings, and it sounds fantastic.

If you are making MP3s... Well, MP3 is niether PCM nor Dolby. If you are making MP3s, you should rip to PCM and then encode to MP3, or rip directly to MP3. You should not rip to dolby, and then re-encode to MP3.

And, audio CDs only contain 2-channels of data. There is no advantage of ripping to something like Dolby 5.1. (A Dolby Pro-Logic reciever can generate surround-sound "soundfields" from a CD, or from a stereo MP3 file at playback-time.)

CDs and "regular" WAV files are both uncompressed PCM. When you rip a CD to a (44.1kHz) WAV file, the audio data is identical to the CD, it's just re-packaged. You can convert back-and-forth between CD and WAV as many times as you wish without altering the audio data. So of course, the WAV (PCM) file will sound exactly like the CD (when played-back on the same system).

Re-sampling to a lower sample-rate, means a loss of data. Re-sampling to a higher bitrate will give you a bigger file with more data, but it's not useful data... It's essentially redundant data.

Dolby AC3 and MP3 are lossy compression formats. Some information is thrown-away when the file is compressed. If you decode (decompress) the MP3 and burn it to CD, the data on that CD will NOT be identical to the original CD. But, if you've used a high-enough bitrate, you shouldn't hear any difference. In general, you should try to avoid converting from one lossy format to a different lossy compression format because this requires two lossy-compression steps.

An equalizer doesn't compress.* An equalizer alters the frequency balance... It's up to you to decide if any particular processing improves or degrades the sound. (A good recording played on a good system won't need any processing.)



* The word "compression" has two meanings. MP3 (lossy) and FLAC (lossless) are file-size compression. Lossless compression does not alter the data or sound. Ideally, lossy (file-size) compression does not alter the sound either.

Dynamic compression does alter the sound. (It has no effect on file size.) It makes quiet sounds louder and/or loud sounds quieter. In practice, dynamic compression is used by CD producers and radio stations to make "everything loud".

If I understand you correctly this is about playing, not ripping.
If so, this card does upsampling to 48 and 96. You might give it a try as sometimes a DAC might sound better when using upsampling.