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Sure it matters

Posted by Presto (A) on December 28, 2006 at 16:30:15

In Reply to: Does Sound Card Matter In This Case posted by Dynaudio_Rules on December 28, 2006 at 14:47:25:

Dynaudio:

First of all, you said you want ASIO support of spdif. Be careful here. Some cards that are "ASIO compliant" do not have ASIO support for SPDIF. A perfect example are the M-Audio Revolution 5.1/7.1 cards. Yes, they have ASIO driver - but not for the SPDIF; only for their analog I/O.

Second, you want to avoid cards that resample to 48 or 96 khz - you want a card that will do "bit-perfect" 16/44.1 for CD playback. If you are going with a high-buck card that is ASIO, this is likely a non-issue. But if you are going to go the "low-buck" route, the situation varies from card to card. A good low buck solution that will do bit-perfect 44.1 is a Chaintech AV710.

Cards with a C-media 9738 or 9768 chipset (for example) will often have a selectable 48 or 96 khz SPDIF output. This means 44.1 (RBCD) is going to be resampled. Older Creative cards (Audigy line for example) also do this.

I am not sure about the new Creative X-Fi line because I avoid Creative simply because their products are so geared towards the PC/Gamer market they almost always cause problems for audiophile applications.

There are also USB SPDIF solutions available if you want to go the USB route.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,
Presto

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