help to select sound card - need only digital out

[kyselym]

hello my old SB live5.1 broken and I need new sound card. I plan to buy yamaha receiver 7.1 . Can you suggest me some sound cards I can use? plan to connect it via coaxial cable(digital in). may I use some cheap soundcard with only 5.1 decoding?How these digital out works?does the sound card decodes sound and than encode again? or it purely passthrough all sound data(in all formats)?
ps. want to use all my speakers (have 7.1 already)

many thanks for any advice or explanation

[kyselym]

im sure many of you must have solved this problem... we all have pc and watch movies on them so we must have some soundcard in pc. many of us have an external decoder in some receiver and DIY made speakers. Same like me. but the question is: Do I need spend a huge money on super sound card?- that never reaches quality of external decoder? well my systemIY made speakers(st. like BW 703 or 801D ) DIY made amps (st like NAD T973) decoder will be that in some yamaha 7.1 receiver (rxv757 for example). Can sb help me pick some sound card to complemet this system? or some plans for a DIY made soundcard with digital 7.1 output?

many thanks for any help

[Alexandre]

Hi. If all you need is unprocessed digital output, you can try the Chaintec AV-710. It is very cheap. Do a search on head-fi.org to learn more about this card.

[danb1974]

Soundcard passes the unaltered ac3/dd/dts/whatever stream to the receiver which decodes it. There is no way to pass unencoded multichannel over spdif (not enough bandwidth).

Only when the computer generates the multichannel sound (I guess there are games capable of that) it has to do the encoding.

Either way soundcard shouldn't make noticeable difference.

As a note, I built a spdif coax output for my onboard sound (in my part of the world it's a bit difficult to order the original backside connector for digital out) and I'm very pleased with it.

[kyselym]

Thanks for help. I seareched Chaintec AV-710 and found a lot of useful information. But I cant buy it in my republic fortunately found another solution. So if anyone has same problem buy Prodigy 7.1 LT its more expansive but not a bad buy.

reason: it fully supports AISO ("ASIO is a high end feature that playsback audio without any resampling; hence it's pure and unmolested")
exactly what I wanted

ps. chaintech it has also

[kyselym]

Originally posted by danb1974
Soundcard passes the unaltered ac3/dd/dts/whatever stream to the receiver which decodes it. There is no way to pass unencoded multichannel over spdif (not enough bandwidth).

Only when the computer generates the multichannel sound (I guess there are games capable of that) it has to do the encoding.

Either way soundcard shouldn't make noticeable difference.

As a note, I built a spdif coax output for my onboard sound (in my part of the world it's a bit difficult to order the original backside connector for digital out) and I'm very pleased with it.

not sure I understand it well. this is how I read it: I can buy some stereo soundcard with digital out and as it passthrouh all data my 7.1 receiver it will decode to 7.1 (if the source is 7.1) is this correct?
if it is correct than why there is some AISO standart?

I realy would like to understand these things can sb explain me?

[danb1974]

I don't know any AISO

If you are referring to ASIO these are low latency drivers (needed mostly if you compose / mix music)

http://www.soundblaster.com/resource...id=53937&cat=3

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If you have a digital connection between the sound card and the receiver, the receiver will decode anything it recognizes (pcm, dts, ac3), computer just needs to pass the bitstream.