Witch Sound Cards for my HT?

[lester01]

I have 3 options for sound for my home theater system( marrantz sr5003 with cerwing vegas ve-series)...my question is which one of these sound card is better?

1)Onboard Audio
Audio Chipset VIA VT1828S
Audio Channels 8 Channels

2)HT OMEGA STRIKER SOUND CARD

3)ATI RADEON 5700 VIDEO CARD

i will appreciate any help

[ajaidev]

VT1828S is pretty good

[Bobsama]

If you have S/PDIF outputs, use those. Otherwise, HDMI (simplest). You don't want to use analogue-out.

[lester01]

The VT1828S have s/pdif outputs and the ht omega srtiker too..

[Bobsama]

Then either of those should be your choice; they SHOULD output the same exact thing and let your Marantz receive decode it.

[gillll]

if u wanna hear hd sound like true hd and dts hd u must use the hdmi.
with a hdmi reciever of course.

[Bobsama]

That has very little to do with anything. If a DVD is encoded with 24/96 or 16/48, it's decoded by almost any recent DAC. That particular receiver is quite good. If the HD5770 works with the audio-over-HDMI option, use it. I remember hearing about problems with that in particular, where it was limited to 2-channel audio. Otherwise, HDMI is just the preferred connection for DRM reasons more than audio quality reasons; S/PDIF Optical or Coax is the preferred connection for 24/96 & 24/192 audio within audio circles.

[gillll]

as i heard ccc 10.3 fixed the 2channel over hdmi.

and to hear 8ch lpcm or truehd/dtshd u need hdmi,

[Hell Hound]

No you need hardware Decoder,the wire does not matter.If thats was the case you would see HDMI headphones.

[Donnie27]

No you need hardware Decoder,the wire does not matter.If thats was the case you would see HDMI headphones.

No, gillll is right, you need HDMI. You're confusing Pre and Post Processing. It's already decoded by the time it get to the Headphones as an Analog Signal.



if u wanna hear hd sound like true hd and dts hd u must use the hdmi.
with a hdmi reciever of course.

True!


That has very little to do with anything. If a DVD is encoded with 24/96 or 16/48, it's decoded by almost any recent DAC. That particular receiver is quite good. If the HD5770 works with the audio-over-HDMI option, use it. I remember hearing about problems with that in particular, where it was limited to 2-channel audio. Otherwise, HDMI is just the preferred connection for DRM reasons more than audio quality reasons; S/PDIF Optical or Coax is the preferred connection for 24/96 & 24/192 audio within audio circles.


That's not quite true! S/PDIF would have Bandwidth limitations as well.

http://www.hdmi.org/

None 1.3a HDMI and S/PDIF can't do 1080P and any of the True Audio formats like True HD Master Audio. It is a question of Bandwidth and DRM, not one or the other. 24/96 covers more than one standard as well. Example 24/96 Stereo DVD Audio can be sent S/PDIF due to lower bandwidth than Video and Audio can't.



Q. What is the difference between a “Standard” HDMI cable and a “High-Speed” HDMI cable?

Recently, HDMI Licensing, LLC announced that cables would be tested as Standard or High-Speed cables.

* Standard (or “category 1”) HDMI cables have been tested to perform at speeds of 75Mhz or up to 2.25Gbps, which is the equivalent of a 720p/1080i signal.
* High Speed (or “category 2”) HDMI cables have been tested to perform at speeds of 340Mhz or up to 10.2Gbps, which is the highest bandwidth currently available over an HDMI cable and can successfully handle 1080p signals including those at increased color depths and/or increased refresh rates from the Source. High-Speed cables are also able to accommodate higher resolution displays, such as WQXGA cinema monitors (resolution of 2560 x 1600).


http://www.bigbrownbus.com/mixerton/whitepapers/spdif/sp-dif.html



The physical link for S/PDIF carries a Biphase Manchester Coded stream. Manchester Coding is a class of line coding methods which combine a data stream with a clock on a single channel where there are up to two transitions on the line for each bit conveyed. With Biphase Manchester, there is a line transition at each end of a bit period and a central transition if the data is a one. For CD audio at 44.1 Ksps the line rate is 5.6448 megabaud and the effective data rate is 2.8224 Mbps or 352.8 kilobytes per second.

The reason signals are compressed over S/PDIF lines. HDMI is un-compressed and the newest standard is 1.4 HDMI for even more bandwidth that 3D creates (think this was formally 1.3c). No way I claim to have all of the answers but I do have a Pioneer that supports true formats and my computer has the ATI and Prelude sound enabled. Thank goodness for Bypass since my LG Set-top has that setting as well. Yes, even if the Receiver decodes the signal, S/PDIF still wouldn't provide the needed Bandwidth for the DATA unless I totally missed what the standards are and that is possible:)

[AmiJIm]

All your equipment are above medriocare.Therefore only trial and error would show you the best configuration.Since you have hdmi equipment you get digital output and you will have great results,yet i use an asus xonar sound card with better quality than creative x-fi or nvidia nforce3 onboard.But then again i use analog 7.1 output.