Soundcard recommendations

[beatle]

If you've seen my other thread about my computer hating me, you'll know it was my Audigy 2 ZS. I actually liked the card until it turned on me. I'm considering the M-Audio Revolution 5.1, as it was the other hot card to have last year. I'm completely oblivious to any new developments. Things that are important:

[*] DVD-Audio support (can any other card do this yet)?
[*] Good control panel for adjusting sound: needs to be able to expand a stereo source without too much processing. 5 channel stereo would be ideal.
[*] Must be able to support bass redirection to a subwoofer. I hook up to a receiver via 6 channel discrete analog, so if it can't redirect bass to the subwoofer channel, I'm SOL for bass. The onboard AC'97 audio on my A8V can't do this.
[*] Under $100

Is the M-Audio still the best alternative?

 

[Pariah]

No cards support DVD-A except Creative's.

 

[beatle]

The m-audio should support it with an appropriate player like WinDVD6, right? It supports up to 24/192 on all channels simultaneously and DVD-Audio is only 24/96 6-ch or 24/192 2-ch. Has anyone done this?

 

[Pariah]

No it won't, it's not a hardware issue, it's a software issue. WinDVD's DVD-A support requires that you use one of Creative's supporting cards.

 

[beatle]

BAH! I HATE CREATIVE! :|:roll::thumbsdown::brokenheart:

 

[Pariah]

This has nothing to do with Creative. In order to support DVD-A the card/drivers have to process the DVD-A encryption without ever passing the audio digitally unencryted which means the SPDIF out has to be disabled when playing discs and Creative has to pay licensing fees and basically guarantee they won't screw up and accidently leak the encryption scheme through their software like Xing did with their DVD video player leaking the DVD video encryption scheme. Up to this point, Creative is the only company that has stepped up and done the deeds. When you pay extra for Creative cards you really are paying for extra features and software, though most of it usually goes unused by people.

 

[beatle]

Fine, the finger goes to the RIAA, jerks. :| Guess I'll put my DVD-Audio discs on ebay along with the card, as they are now essentially worthless to me. :thumbsdown:

How about the other features I listed? Can I satisfy those with another card? If so, which would be best suited to the job?

 

[gryfon]

i've read your other threads, but i haven't seen this mentioned. What drivers did you used for the a2zs ? Have you tried different drivers ? I hope your a2zs is fine, coz the selling the dvd audio is a pretty sad things to do . As for the m audio revo, it's a great card for music, especially with no 48Khz resampling, but a little heavy cpu usage for gaming, and only eax 2.0 IIRC, for DTS / DD it should be as good as creative, because AFAIK creative decoding is also done on driver level, not hardware.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: beatle
BAH! I HATE CREATIVE! :|:roll::thumbsdown::brokenheart:

I hate Creative's programming staff; those are the idiots responsible for my own serious problems and resultant dislike of using their products. Of course, the "non-support" bad attitudes of their employees didn't endear the company to me, either. If enjoying music depended on Creative for me, I'd end up with no music at all.



:|

 

[beatle]

Originally posted by: gryfon
i've read your other threads, but i haven't seen this mentioned. What drivers did you used for the a2zs ? Have you tried different drivers ? I hope your a2zs is fine, coz the selling the dvd audio is a pretty sad things to do . As for the m audio revo, it's a great card for music, especially with no 48Khz resampling, but a little heavy cpu usage for gaming, and only eax 2.0 IIRC, for DTS / DD it should be as good as creative, because AFAIK creative decoding is also done on driver level, not hardware.

I had been running the latest drivers. Last night I installed the drivers off the CD and I'm still having problems.

 

[gryfon]

just a note, according to pariah above, no software player that would played dvd audio, well i just found out that was not entirely true, because i just ran the audigy 2 zs dvd audio sampler disc on my notebook with windvd 6.0. the notebook only has onboard sigmatel c major sound card. So you could just cancel your plan to ebay the dvd audio. But try testing first with your dvd audio disc, and windvd 6.0, and see if it works with your dvd audio collection, cause i don't have another dvd audio disc to try besides the audigy 2 zs sampler disc.

regards.

 

[beatle]

It'll play the Dolby portion of the disc. The actual DVD-Audio content won't be played. I can put in The Eagles or Metallica in my drive and get music, but it's not DVD-Audio.

 

[SilverBack]

I have an Audigy 2 ZS which is absolutely fantastic for DVD-Audio.
To bad you don't like Creative.

DTS is fantastic for audio dvd's.
The Eagles Hell Freezes Over is the best DVD I have to demo the system to people. Great stuff.

 

[beatle]

It's not that I don't like Creative, it's that their card apparently doesn't like me! I cannot get my system stable with it in it.

 

[SilverBack]

Hi Beatle,
Most people who have problems with Creative Cards are unaware that in many systenms the card has to be located in a PCI slot that it unshared with any other devices. A good example is that you can't put a creative card next to your AGP video card. This is a terrible IRQ conflict. The AGP slot and the 1st PCI slot share the IRQ.
It's been my experience that on "most" motherboards the 3rd PCI from the AGP slot doesn't share resources.
That's a very good slot to try 1st.

Also, I know it sounds odd, many people forget to disable the onboard sound in BIOS and of course the system locks trying to install two different sound systems.


I hated the original Audigy, it has issues with backward compatibilities in motherboards. BUT the Audigy 2 seems to be a great card.

 

[beatle]

My experience dictated that every slot was a bad slot for the Audigy, even when it was the only card in the system. Yes, onboard sound was disabled.

 

[gryfon]

Originally posted by: beatle
It'll play the Dolby portion of the disc. The actual DVD-Audio content won't be played. I can put in The Eagles or Metallica in my drive and get music, but it's not DVD-Audio.

as i stated before, i don't think a2zs creative dvd audio sampler had a dolby digital track, yet i played it successfuly on an onboard laptop 2 channel sound card. here's a screenshot of the windvd 6 info :

pic

notice the stream bitrate, and packed type, and 'dvd audio' type on windvd player.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Woah IIRC doesn't Soundstorm support this. Not like he is going to run out and by a M/B but im fairly sure that SS supports this.

-Kevin

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: gryfon

Originally posted by: beatle
It'll play the Dolby portion of the disc. The actual DVD-Audio content won't be played. I can put in The Eagles or Metallica in my drive and get music, but it's not DVD-Audio.

as i stated before, i don't think a2zs creative dvd audio sampler had a dolby digital track, yet i played it successfuly on an onboard laptop 2 channel sound card. here's a screenshot of the windvd 6 info :

pic

notice the stream bitrate, and packed type, and 'dvd audio' type on windvd player.

The output has been resampled to 16-bit/48KHz, which is typical of WinDVD and copy protected DVD-Audio with any soundcard other than the the A2 series.

 

[gryfon]

The output has been resampled to 16-bit/48KHz, which is typical of WinDVD and copy protected DVD-Audio with any soundcard other than the the A2 series

my response is to the dvd audio *can't be played* on a non creative card, it *can*, however i don't realize that without creative, there's no more 96khz and 24 bit. But if the op and Parian play means play in 24/96 or 24/192 then i apologize. I can't also confirm whether multichannel support is there (5.1) as i don't have a non creative 5.1 soundcard. PowerDVD 6 seems to also have dvd audio with deluxe version, but i can't confirm its ability to output native dvd audio format without resample.