Any Benefit in Getting a Sound Card ?

[SkyWalker1726]

Hi Everyone ,
i currently have a Denon AVR1912 + 7.1 Focal Connected to my PC Via HDMI to an 680GTX nvidia ( wich i use to play games , watch blurays and listen to music ) , what i wanted to know is that would i gain in sound quality by buying a Sound Card ( Creative ZxR is the card that i have in mind ) ?

the idea came to me while i was @ a Friend house and he had his Creative X-Fi Titanium connected to a Z5500 Logitech Speaker System and the Sound Was Amazing ( Specially Price/Performance Wise ) and Much Crisper than mine . we also tried his onboard soundcard and and switched back to the X-fi and the difference in quality was Huge ...

after some googling i found out that the sound that his Sound Card did output was ANALOG , and that his speaker set is analog too , and my system is Digital and that my AVR did not support Analog sound , and that if i wanted to connect a Sound card to my AVR i had to opt for the Optical port and a Sound-card woundn't do any good to a Digitall Output ...

so would a Xonar or ZxR be of any help to me in getting a better sound quality ? is analog sound better than Digitall ?

Any help or advice would be appreciated

Thanks

 

[baijuxavior]

A sound card or DAC will enhance sound quality marginally. Instead of creative cards go for Asus Xonar series or any external DACs. Denon 1912 has analog inputs to which you can connect the output of the DAC.

 

[spirovious]

With AVR there wont be much improvement as you found in Z5500.These speakers are designed to get good sound from PC/soundcard.

 

[SkyWalker1726]

A sound card or DAC will enhance sound quality marginally. Instead of creative cards go for Asus Xonar series or any external DACs. Denon 1912 has analog inputs to which you can connect the output of the DAC.

it does have analog inputs but only Left and Right .
so i won't be able to have 5.1 or 7.1 Dolby or DTS sound from the sound card right ?

 

[baijuxavior]

^^ I thought you were speaking about improvement in stereo audio.

 

[edge111hussain]

I recently saw an asus soundcard with only hdmi output. Referring to the sound card we happen to see at the new bombay hifi meet. Check that out. It only has hdmi out and is designed to be connected to a HT setup with an AVR. Contact #bikenstein from this forum for more details (he works for asus)

 

[alphacentury100]

When you play 5.1 or 7.1 (Dolby or Dts) sound from your PC, it doesn't matter if you have a sound card or not as the raw audio signal is sent directly to the receiver, which has a better decoder than your onboard pc. However, in case of stereo(mp3, flac, etc) the audio signal gets decoded by the PC and then sent to the receiver via your HDMI. To get better stereo sound from your PC, you need to bypass this decoding process and send them to a better decoder. To do this, we use DAC, which receives asynchronous signal from the PC through USB and processes them, or you can also use good sound cards like the Asus Xonar ESSENCE STX etc. In case of DAC, the Digital to Analog conversion is done outside the PC by the DAC and in case of a Sound Card, the Digital to Analog conversion is done inside the PC. In either cases, you will only get analog signal, which can be sent to the Receiver. Hope that helps.