5.1 surround

Pat36A

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will someone recommend a good surround sound system for use with a PC?

Quick reply appreciated - need to get a note to Santa!

Thanks
 
Creative T7700s - 7.1 speaker system, about £65, I'm very happy with them.
 
Its all analog, but its fairly good sound wise.

Creative card+creative sound system (5.1)

I just dont like how they have managed to monopolize the sound card market.

I wish someone would make a card that has digital outputs that can be conected to a digital amp to get Dolby Digital 5.1 though an optical cable.

Its only possible with DVDs just now. Not for the desk top or gaming.

(even though a few years back a lot of games were "offering" DD 5.1....
 
the intel HDA audio chipset and the nvidia sound storm 2 chipset carried out dolby digital encoding in real time, and could output multichannel audio from games along the spdif as 6 channel dolby digital.

not sure if anyones using the Intel HDA chipset in soundcards though.

pez
 
I wish someone would make a card that has digital outputs that can be conected to a digital amp to get Dolby Digital 5.1 though an optical cable.

They do! http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/x-mystique.php

I got one from overclockers a few weeks back but its not on their site any longer. Works really well, and encodes Dolby Digital Live so you get proper 5.1 through to your amp.

Only downside is its only EAX2 (not the latest version) but then I don't think any non-Creative soundcard has EAX4.
 
EAX2 was an open format to get developer support. EAX 3 onwards (up to EAX HD) is proprietary to Creative, so there won't be any other cards that support this feature than the Soundblaster line. Having said this, consoles have been running games without EAX for some time and they sound fantastic. I can only assume that the CPU's do much of the sound processing (isn't it all software for the '360?) so hardware EAX acceleration may not be such of an issue in the, admittedly far, future.

The HDA cards are good with flawless 5.1 output, but they have poor upmixing from stereo unless they have DTS Connect capabilities, and even then it isn't as good as PL2. I would also say that the software is a bit hit-and-miss until you get used to it, whereupon you wonder why Creative insists on dumping a few hundred meg of bloatware on your PC in order to get the most out of their cards.

Russell
 
Yeah, the original version of Doom3 did all of its environmental audio processing on the CPU, and sounded great with either 6 channel analogue output or when running that through a dolby digital encoder (didnt try the HDA stuff, but the soundstorm did a great job with it when it worked).

Why upmix from stereo? Surely it would be a better idea to leave that alone and output the basic stereo PCM from the card to a processor to do PL with?
 
Forgot about this thread in the xmas rush.

Thanks to all who replied - got a little technical for me!

Went for a Creative T6 100 package in the end. Probably not the best choice - now having difficulty trying to rig it up to work with a 360. See my thread in X Box Gameing.
 

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