Best sound Card currently available and future
I have been meaning to get a new sound card to replace my Audigy for some time, and was thinking about the Audigy 2 ZS, but I was wondering if this was currently the best card or not, and whether any other cards are on the horizon at all? For the record the card needs to be 7.1 and EAX HD is preferable. Currently the A2 ZS Retail only costs £61, so thats not too bad. Any recommendations or ideas about the future? This is for general use btw, Gaming, Music, etc.
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Shame no-one seems to know anything about them....
*COUGHS*
PS: Don't get fooled with S/P DIF out and gaming on any card. The best sound for gaming comes when you send the lines separately analog to an amp...not combined digitally. When you send them via SPDIF the sound is converted to a dolby format which is not native in most games...then reconverted back to separate channels...there will be a small amount of loss of spatial representation.
For movies, of course, you can send the signal via SPDIF. Same with music.
/me knows a thing or two...not much but a thing or two.
The problem with the M-AR is that it only supports EAX2, not HD or 4, which is kind of a let down as I find EAX HD is a nice touch in games.
S/P DIF digital sound is a single stream hence the single cable. It's like a river that needs to be split into its tributaries. If the source is digital then that stream must be decoded or split into the separate outputs, in this case, speakers.
Stereo music (MP3) is split easily to left and right and a DVD with DTS or Dolby needs to be decoded at the end of the stream just before it is sent for analog amplification.
If you don't have a Dolby or DTS decoder at the amplification end then the signal must be decoded and sent separately via analog lines as separate signals to the amplification device.
If the sound card is feeding an amp that has built in DTS or Dolby then the signal can be sent via the SPDIF cable.
Games, as you mentioned, use a different encoding format. If your amplification had EAX, EAX2 or HD decoding then you can send the signal via a digital cable (Toslink or Digital) to have the amp decode it to analog.
I haven't seen any home theatre amps with the DTS, Dolby, EAX etc symbols on them but I think we should soon...it's a good idea for the home theatre maket to add another price point option.
Anyway...in order to use non Dolby or DTS sound on an SPDIF link the EAX or HD signal must be decoded then recoded to a form that can be re-decoded by the end amplifier.
Such as Dolby Digital 5.1.
So the signal is converted from EAX (or otherwise) to Dolby Digital 5.1 then sent on the digital connection to the amp to be decoded into separate signals for analog amplification. You add the step of encoding thus "could" affect the original fidelity of the EAX sound as it was originally meant to be.
If you use the sound card to decode EAX sound and send it via the analog outs you are skipping the decoding>encoding>sending>decoding>amplify step.
You are decoding>sending>amplifying thus you don't have any potential loss or misinterpretation of the sound as it was meant to be.
For those that are concerned thinking that using the analog lines will suck in comparison. What matters is the best decoder and where the "dirt" is in the chain to the speakers.
If the home theatre amp has a better decoder then the PC sound card should just pass through the audio and send it digitally to the amp for processing. But if the amp sucks for decoding but has a clean amplification then I'd say use the PC for decoding and send the sound analog to the amp for amplification.
Bottom line: I don't think you'll really notice a difference either way unless you knew what it should sound like or where to listen. You'd need to do proper analysis via professional measuring equipment. But given that all things equal you could probably say that waveform analysis would show that the analog connection would produce better spatial orientation for EAX(2)/HD games though it would be hard to tell by just listening.
I wasn't aware EAX was a format, just an audio processing method, the audio is still in plain multi channel PCM format. This is then outputted via analogue normally giving the 7.1 channels or so, no encoding or decoding required, so techincally EAX couldn't ever be on an external amp as it isn't an encoding format where as DD is. They just need a losless format for encoding and decoding that could be used as the packaging method to send via the digital outputs to a decoder that supports the new format.
And so do MP3s
and CD audio
and so forth.
Format is just the simplest layman way to define that there's a difference between to types.