What's new

Recommend a sound card for 5.1 gaming thru receiver? (1 Viewer)

Parker Clack

Schizophrenic Man
Moderator
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jun 30, 1997
Messages
12,228
Location
Kansas City, MO
Real Name
Parker
Adam:

Glad to hear you got it working. I love my HDA and I am glad to hearing it is working great for gaming. I recommend this card to just about everyone I know as it does all you could want in a sound card and at the same time not cost you an arm and a leg.
 

EdQ

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Feb 27, 2000
Messages
55
I just picked up the SB Fatality card. It sounds great on the PC 5.1 speakers. I get sound out of all 6 speakers on everygame. BF2, CSS...

But when hooking it up to my Integra receiver with analog cables. I get sound out of every speaker except for the sub. I can't figure out why. CSS does 5.1
 

JediFonger

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
4,237
Real Name
YiFeng You
either creative and auzentech wil work. it really depends on how many wires you are willing to run. if you absolutely need 1 wire ONLY from HTPC to AVR... then get auzentech or turtle beach (beware if you have windows 64-bit, turtle beach doesn't have drivers for that OS). if you CAN accept 5.1 or 7.1 wires from HTPC, then either card will work, with creative having an edge because of the EAX support/standards.

my quibble with auzentech's mystique or explosion is that they don't autodetect and auto-adjust different sources to different codecs. if you enable SPDIF stereo 48kHz and you start gaming, the card doesn't automatically change the settings to DDL5.1. conversely, if you enable DDL 5.1 and you start playing an mp3 stereo file.... the software doesn't change DDL back to PCM stereo, in fact DDL mode enabled DPL matrix on stereo sources (argh!) that i can't turn off. if i enable DDL 5.1 and i play stereo source it should only be in L&R. i think meridian's going to be the same. at least offer people the option to turn it on or off. its good for gaming... but music playback it a pain.
 

Andres Munoz

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 1999
Messages
2,489
You guys weren't kidding about the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 card. I just bought it, installed and tested it.

HOLY SH-T!

What an improvement. I was using my motherboard's built-in audio chip and I thought that sounded pretty good. But this...wow. My MP3s and games come alive now. Very crisp, very detailed and the bass is heard and felt.

I remember reading somewhere when I was doing research on this card that some reviewer said he didn't notice a difference between the Dolby Digital Live and the DTS Interactive. I don't know what system he was using but in mine I can definately hear a difference. The DTS sounds more detailed so that's the setting I'm using from now on.

I'm liking this so much that now I'm wondering if there is some device that can do real-time DTS encoding to my Dish Network satellite audio signal. :D
 

Paul_Sjordal

Supporting Actor
Joined
May 29, 2003
Messages
831
Turtle Beach doesn't have 64 bit drivers yet? Odd.

One of the big selling points of Turtle Beach (at least a few years back when I researched them) is that they tend to produce drivers at a faster rate than other sound card companies. I'm still kicking myself for buying a Hercules Game Theater XP instead of a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both were based on the same chips, but Turtle Beach tended to resolve more application-specific bugs/conflicts than Hercules.
 

Paul_Sjordal

Supporting Actor
Joined
May 29, 2003
Messages
831

I recently got an Audigy 2 ZS after years of staying away from Creative products.

I used to pooh-pooh it, but having tried it, higher versions of EAX are noticably better than EAX2, assuming your game supports it. Of course the real reason to want a Creative card is the fact that they are still the only sound card manufacturer that handles "3D" sound in hardware rather than eating clock cycles on your CPU. Creative Labs cards really don't have much else to recommend them, in my opinion. They create a lot of extra traffic on the PCI bus (which may or may not affect you, but still...), their drivers stink, and then there's the matter of Creative's infamous bloatware.

I did notice one other nice thing when I came crawling back to Creative: the audio codecs work better. With my old Game Theater XP, there were just certain audio codecs that simply would not work no matter what codec pack I installed or how I configured said codec packs.
 

JediFonger

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
4,237
Real Name
YiFeng You
regarding your comment about creative's+CPU cycles. it's too little to notice with the 2Ghz processors you have. if we were pre 1Ghz i might agree with you, every little bit counts... but now we have excess. 1fps is not a huge diff. it's 2small a margin. it's one of those myths creative likes to propagate.

i dunno what kind of "3D" you're doing outside of games... but my X-mystique handles everything fine. when i had a m-audio rev 7.1, it also handled all 3D fine but with panache. the quality is so much higher (lower noise).

now... if you game ALL the time and nearly exclusively, there's really no competition, Creative helped define game audio standards and it's kinda' here to stay despite naysayers like intel.

but if you don't game a lot and like HT-stuff more... than any card with DDL/DTSC or SPDIF is better at handling HT stuff than creative. creative refuses to implement DDL. ah well, their loss.




PS info about 64-bit from turtle themselves:
from:
http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/.../588119089.asp
 

Paul_Sjordal

Supporting Actor
Joined
May 29, 2003
Messages
831


Yeah, gaming is mostly what I do with this machine. I didn't think all the "ooh ahh" features of EAX3+ would matter that much to me, but I have to admit that I like it now that I've tried it. I'm just glad I didn't blow the extra cash on a Xi-Fi (even more PCI traffic).
 

JediFonger

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
4,237
Real Name
YiFeng You
you shouldn't have sound dropouts due to PCI being choked. there's somn else going on here you should look into. that's not the norm, otherwise gamers across the world will have had an uprising =).
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Forum statistics

Threads
356,710
Messages
5,121,076
Members
144,145
Latest member
treed99
Recent bookmarks
0
Top