new sound card

[chavo]

Hi all,

Well the problem is this. i have an Onkyo 607 Amp, i have tannoy 5.1sfx speakers. when i watch sky hd, all the lights come on the amp to show the sound is set up corectly, i set the amp to "TV logic" this means it does nothing with the sound just passes it straight through to the speakers.

I have a C-Media CMI8738, sound card that has Optical out ( to link to my amp). when i watch a movie that i have ripped to my hard drive (or downloaded) the lights dont come on. now i can set the amp to play it in 5.1 but it is not true DTS.

after a bit of research i found out that my soundcard does not support it, damn!

So i need to look for one that does, i dont want it to do anything else really, not interested in all the other wonderfull capabilities, i just want it to play my films.

it would also need an optical out to link to my amp.

any suggestions, i dont want to spend up on it, i was hoping no more that £30 -£40 quid.

[chavo]

Anyone have any input in this subject for me?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would look at one of the Asus Xonar cards:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pr...imit=10&page=1

http://www.scan.co.uk/search.aspx?q=asus+xonar

The Asus Xonar DS has optical out:

http://www.elitebastards.com/index.p...7&limitstart=2

[chavo]

Thanks very much, a friend has said that it is not the card i need but drivers. he says he has a similar card to mine although he is not sure of his model. could this be the case?

[dangel]

Thanks very much, a friend has said that it is not the card i need but drivers. he says he has a similar card to mine although he is not sure of his model. could this be the case?

I use optical out with onboard sound - if you have external decoder (i.e. a receiver like you do) then what you want to do is pass the sound straight through (i.e. the sound card/onboard sound should do anything with the stream - just dump it to the reciever to deal with). The easiest way to get this working is to uninstall any codec packs you've got installed (klite etc) [if any] and then install shark007's codec pack - then use the simple setting application to enable pass thru for sound (i.e. do nothing to it let the reciever deal with it).



It's also a good idea to disable all but the optical out in the control panel for sound devices as this means you'll never have issues with selecting between analog and digital outputs.

Here's the link:

http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html

To quote the site:

"Audio output and Speaker setup

The codec packs contains a Settings Application to use in conjunction with your windows media center setup which will enable each user to choose different splitters and decoders for specific filetypes. The application will also allow you to choose from 10 different speaker configurations from 'same as input' and all the way up to full 7.1 channel output.

To use SPDIF output - Go into Control Panel\Sound and make sure S/PDIF is your default output mode
Next, configure your output modes. follow Sound\SPDIF\Properties\Advanced\Exclusive Mode
depending on your sound device, the path may be a bit different but similar
to find and CHECK the box [x] for the following 2 items
'allow applications to take exclusive control of this device'
'give exclusive mode applications priority'

Within Media Center; Go to Tasks, General, Windows Media Center Setup, Setup Your Speakers.
Run that wizard, choose your digital connection type (coax or optical) and specify your speaker setup.

Then use the settings application to setup pass-through options on the Audio TAB."


Hope that's of some use! Of course the source needs to be 5.1 to get 5.1 etc but if it's multichannel then your receiver should be getting the correct feed and it'll just work.

[Terbinator]

You can set the audio to pass through from within media player classic if thats what your using ? So it passes the AC3/DTS track to your reciever rather than decode it itself.

[shaithis]

You could also take HDMI from your GFX card (if it can do HDMI....many new cards have HDMI or can do DVI>HDMI with a dongle) and get glorious 24bit, 96-192KHz, uncompressed sound strait to your amp

You can then even switch the amp to that HDMI input and get both sound and video to your system.

This way there is no messing around, the multichannel sound it handled by windows out-of-the-box.