Best way to run my Z5500's?

[SlowSpyder]

I was reading a different post about speakers and realized I really don't know what the best way is to connect my Logitech Z5500's to my computer. Right now I have an optical cable from my integrated sound card running to the receiver of my Logitech Z5500's. I have this motherboard.

I do not have an add-on sound card, just the integrated sound that comes with that mother board. I have used both the analog cables and the optical, I didn't notice much difference, but I did notice the optical cable seemed louder at the same volume setting. Also, one thing I noticed but never really worried about is when I choose the 5.1 DTS sound on my Gladiator DVD I get no sound at all. As far as I'm aware my speakers should be able to handle that?

Can anyone educate me on what I might be doing wrong and give me some opinions on how I may want to connect my Z5500's to my motherboard?

Thanks!

 

[Seekermeister]

DTS is better, but Dolby is the standard for DVDs. Not all DVDs are able to output DTS.

 

[SlowSpyder]

But the option for DTS is there in the audio setup portion, so that's why I thought it was odd that I get no sound.

 

[Seekermeister]

It is standard for audio equipment to have DTS, but not the disks. I do not know how common DTS disks are, but they would be preferable when available.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

If you play games, analog is probably the best way to go unless your audioMAX solution has DD/DTS ENcoding.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=30&threadid=1940133&enterthread=y

If this is just for music and movies though, using digital should be a fine alternative.

Is it just DTS DVDs that give you issues and DD DVDs play fine? What does your Logitech control pod say when you're playing a DVD?

If your soundcard and DVD playing program set to passthrough of the audio bitstream?

 

[SlowSpyder]

I play games as well as listen to music and put the occasional DVD in. I usually don't watch DVD's on the PC, but when I was testing out the speakers I put the movie in. Also, I just got a new 22" LCD so I threw a movie in to see how I liked the LCD, but watching a movie on the PC is rarely something it's used for.

When I play a movie/music I forget the exact message on the display, but it says something to the effect of digital source in.

I don't know what passthrough audio bitstream means... Sorry. Is that like a hardware rendering vs. a software rendering of the audio?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

If you're not really going to be watching movies on your PC, then I'd say stick with analog and don't worry about the passthrough stuff.

If you were hooked up digitally before, you'd want your control pod to say "Dolby Digital" or "DTS" when watching a movie.

Something like "Dolby Prologic" or "DTS Neo" would NOT be what you want for movies.

Basically a DVD has multichannel audio on it that needs to be decoded and changed into discrete information for each channel. When you're hooking up digitally, you'll either be sending your speakers a 2 channel PCM stream or a DD/DTS stream that has not been altered yet. You want to set your sofware to just pass the signal because if you end up having the signal decoded at all along the way, you're not going to be able to give the speakers all the info they need to get discrete information for each channel digitally.

If you hook up with analog though, you have your DD/DTS stream decoded by your comptuer but you can give the speakers each channel information it needs via analog.

But anyway... if gaming is a decent portion of what you do, then do analog. Movies should work correctly too with an analog connection.