Cheapest digital solution - recommendations? (1 Viewer)

[Mark Tranchant]

OK, here's what I want from a PCI soundcard:
* Optical or coaxial S/PDIF output
* True 44.1kHz without sample rate conversion
* DTS and DD passthrough
I've read lots of other threads here, but nothing seems to answer this directly. I've seen the Abit UA-11 USB device which looks promising, but I'm not sure about the DD/DTS functionality.
There are various cheap cards based on the CMI8738 chip.
Any recommendations? I'm looking to spend as little as possible whilst fulfilling the above criteria. The M-Audio stuff is out of my range!

 

[Max Leung]

Hmm, I'd almost recommend the cheapest Soundblaster Live! you can get, but unfortunately because of the AC'97 spec and the internal Windows mixing system that upsamples to 48Khz (and then back down again), there really isn't anything available I know of.

However, I'll have to go home and check WinDVD and see if it would pass CD audio at 44.1Khz PCM unaltered via the S/PDIF passthrough option. Unfortunately, this is no good if you wanted interactive audio (ie. computer games and real-time audio processing) at 44.1kHz.

Meanwhile, I love my nForce chipset motherboards...An Asus A7N266-C and A7N8X Deluxe...DD/DTS passthrough, real-time DD5.1 encoding, and ASIO drivers. But they upsample AFAIK.