Sound card recomendation

[Hacksaw907]

Originally Posted by Robscix

That is not quite true. Even though you are using digital, you can still pass the card features through digital to your external device. Many times, onboards will also have very shotty digital outputs, very jittery and imprecise.

For example, many of the best gaming audio systems I have seen use a gaming card and pass the features through digital to a higher end DAC or receiver. This way you have all the features of the card but have higher quality sound in comparison to just the cards DAC's.

On the other hand, if you have a higher end modern soundcard, you would be better off running analog to many receivers as many modern soundcards would have superior DAC's in comparison to what is available on receiver S/Pdif input section.

Fair enough. I presume you mean features like DDL and DTS, which I would agree with wholeheartedly. As for imprecise digital outputs from onboard cards, I personally have yet to encounter any issues of that sort that can be fixed with a discrete card. There was only one instance where I did encounter noise from a toslink output, but that was not fixable at all due to grounding issues (it was a laptop).

[Robscix]

The issue is people think "digital is digital" as it is just 1's and 0's right? -NO!
There is a timing component present in that signal also and that is where the issue can be...Sloppy timing signal while it will still put out audio you will get distortion and artifacts in your signal.
You end up with a sloppy, imprecise reproduction.

When audio is sampled at say CD quality, the frequency is 44.1Khz. When you have a jitter source you get frequencies of 44.15,44.0..or whatever just slight variances which means the DAC does the conversion at the wrong times. You will also get artifacts that are mathematically related to the wrong frequencies...big mess! You will still hear your song but it will just not sound that good because of the sloppy reproduction. Make sense?

This is why you can buy high precision S/Pdif sources such as the M2tech Hi-Face line and others. These would offer much more precise signal over some point of a cent onboard chip :)
You may require higher grade gear to hear the differences but they are there. Digital audio is a very big topic and it is hard to hear the differences unless you have the gear to do the testing.
Meaning, when you start getting into high end DAC's, amps, speakers..etc you can start to hear issues which you will want to fix in the sources.

When I am speaking of features sure, DTS and DDL is there but they are actually LOSSY, so I usually tell people to avoid them if at all possible, if quality is your end game. If you have say and old X-Fi, you can connect it it digitally to a DAC or receiver. This would give you all the features present on that card over digital. So there are differences between cards even on digital output. We can also talk about coupling quality for coax output and TX/RX quality for optical. Cards are not created equal even when speaking of digital. Not to mention the timing issues mentioned above.

Hope that helps.

[akg242hd]

i bookshelves speaker and 0ld 90' amp the amp only rca out what the best way to get a sound card for it

[SugarJ]

Any sound card, and a 3.5mm to RCA adapter like this: ION Cables 3.5MM to 2RCA Stereo Audio Cable M/2M 1.5M 5FT with 24K Gold Plated Connectors - Ion Cables - IO-3.52RCA

[elmorejohn46]

I had a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium that I used to use all the time But one day I thought I would just use the HDMI on my video cards and hook it up to my AV reciever and that way I was just useing my Home audio speakers which were better anyway and it sounded great ,I could not tell any difference ,really it sounded better going though my reciever ,I have 7.1 so I had sound everwhere.I just think if you have a good home audio unit and even better speakers ,that is just the way to go.The card sends a HD audio signal to my reciever and it does all the processing ,so I have ever thing I need.My Polk Audio speaker system sounds a lot better then my logitech 280watt 5.1 did.

[tranceholic]

i think most people failed to notice that OP wants to hook up to the turntables so he's not really looking to have a high end gaming sound card for music recording LOLs
anyways i'm kind of in the same boat, i'm looking for a high end sound card to input 2 channels on my mixer to the PC and use VDJ as music source.