Xonar D2/PM and Bluray sound

[emueyes]

Hi all

I bought my Xonar D2/PM a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

Now, though, I've been getting into Blurays. My music collection is still all flac and unaffected, but decoding DTS/MA or TrueHD are things the Xonar can't do.

How am I best to arrange things? The onboard sound chips are at least a little better now, and Intel in particular seem to be pushing the quality of their audio.

I'm quite happy with a stereo or a stereo + centre system, and have some nice Dittons and an old Yamaha amp, and aren't so interested in surround for the time being, so I need something that will downmix and do a good job of it.

Is my beloved Xonar obsolete? The whole PCI bus is rapidly disappearing, and, on Intel systems at least, take up valuable PCIe lanes; one of the Gigabyte models for example has a 4xPCIe and 2 1xPCIe slots for add ins, with no PCI slots.

The Xonar driver situation hasn't changed much either it seems, some very dedicated and very talented people giving us drivers. But not Asus.

Whats everyone else doing / thinking?


Rob

[HWaddict]

I got my Xonar DX just two days ago and wanted to try something different from Creative or M-Audio cards.

My motherboard is a ASUS Z8PE-D12X for Servers and Workstations, it lacks PCI slots but have both PCIe and PCI-X, the audiocard that came with the MB was a cheap special solution.

At ASUS driver page I found a Win 7 version that should fix some problems but it didn't work at all so I downgraded the OS to Windows XP 64 SP2 and used a driver disc that followed the Xonar DX instead.

It has a nice warm and dynamic sound that I find appealing and the only glitch was when Winamp crashed and repeated the sample in it's buffer over and over again as some others have experienced and wroted about in forums.

ASUS definitly need to improve driver support but for the most part I enjoy the quality of their product.

[emueyes]

The Asus support for the Xonar has always been bad, you could try the Uni drivers http://brainbit.wordpress.com/category/uni-xonar/ they'll work for Win7

Yeah, the Xonar sounds great, especially with guitar or any string sounds. I use them with some AudioTechnica AD700 'phones, so clean and warm.

I reckon foobar2000 is a better player BTW, it doesn't crash, has had ASIO and kernel streaming for ages, also has plugins for AC3 and DTS tracks which can be handy.

[HWaddict]

Thank's for the link!

I have tried Foobar2000 and it's qualities for Audiophiles I understand but the reason to mainly use Winamp are it's plugin support.

[dcl]

Is there really that much benefit with ASIO? Am I really losing out for playing music via iTunes?

[emueyes]

I don't think ASIO is as important with Win7 or Vista as it was with XP / 2000, though when I was running XP it seemed to be quite dramatic. Win 7 has a different and much better audio software path and most players are written with this in mind, so should 'just work'.

I don't use iTunes so I don't know how it operates, but I doubt you'd be missing anything as far as quality on a 7 or Vista system. On a side note, Media Monkey does all the same sync-to-iPods thing as iTunes and I find it easier to use and less resource hungry. I still use foobar tho - it also has a lot of plugins (and the ability to use some Winamp ones).