5.1 Surround...COAX (Digital vs Analog) for best sound in games/movies, please advise

[SEIZETHEDAY4EVA]

Hi Everyone

I have a Asus Phobus 5.1 sound card hooked up to logitech z5500 speakers.

I use my system purely for games and movies. Currently I have everything connected by 3 analog cables as i read back in the day this creates the best sound but recently i've been reading that digital (spdif) gives off better surround sound, so now I've gone and got myself confused.

So what is best for games and movies for my 5.1 setup?

 

[JeffMD]

Is that the z-5500? Thats quite a beast. It is kind of a mixed bag. The DAC in both the sound card and speaker setup probably sound fantastic. One of the pluses with using a digital out on the pc side is avoiding any bad sounding DACs and utilising higher quality ones from a receiver.

On the flip side, and HDMI does not suffer from this, utilizing a digital connection for surround sound gaming requires that the audio be compressed. So in your case, using your analog connections means you are using your sound cards exceptional DACs and your games are not getting their audio compressed at all. If you went to a digital connection then the DAC in your speakers would be used, but your sound card would need to compress your games 5.1 sound either using dolby or THX, and then send it over the cable and your speakers would decode it. This is less of an issue for movies ,BTW , as their surround sound audio is already compressed, so it would simply be streamed over the digital cable. The only difference in audio quality would be between the soundcard and speaker/receiver DACs.

I said HDMI does not suffer this as it can do 8 channels of uncompressed audio.

 

[giantpandaman2]

Games: Analog

Movies: Depends on which has the better DAC. My guess is you wouldn't hear the difference even if one is slightly better. I'd stick with analog.

 

[NutBucket]

Given your setup it really doesn't matter.

 

[Deders]

Digital can be a lot more complicated to get right. Optical and SPDIF can only really supply a stereo signal. For surround it has to be compressed and encoded to DTS or dolby digital, and not all games support this by default.

Does the Phobos have on the fly DTS encoding? This is different from DTS passthrough, therefore the information in the supported formats tab won't be of relevance to games.