I can't chose!

[Alendri]

Hia ^^ first post

I got a receiver (6.1) and a nice set of speakers, totaling about 600 watts of usuable sound (without the sub). I've got a computer hooked up with my tv and the receiver, but the sound is taken from the onboard sound. And the onboard sound isn't what I want it to be.
First of all the general sound output quality is bad.
Secondly on the way to the receiver I hooked up a splitter so i get two jacks.
One jack for the receiver and one for a headset (this is so that the receiver can be used with other input while still beeing able to use the computer sound, with the headset), which reduces the quality further.
And the most annoying part is that I cannot use the surround sound functions of my receiver since the signal is regular analog 2 channel sound.

So now I'm wondering if there is a smart way to solve this with a new soundcard, I've been looking at many different things, first of all the computer is stuffed to the limit so an internal soundcard is hard, but not impossible.
Therefor I looked at external USB1/2 soundcards. But at the same time to manage to get another powercable isn't very desireable either.

I'm not sure how these digital sound signals work, and where the processing is done. I've been thinking that it would be nice to use the optical input on the receiver for best sound quality, but then I have Dolby etc processing both on the soundcard and the receiver, can their be any interferance?

I wan't a card that reduces some of these noises I get now (possibly from bad quality mp3's or alike), if possible. And as I said the Optical input on the receiver would be preferable.

Suggestions?
Any and all comments on anything that might help me is welcome.

//Alendri

 

[Boilermaker]

somebody is invariably going to ask how much you are willing to spend, and what you do most with your computer (games, music, etc), so i'll go ahead and get that out of the way.

i play games as much as i listen to music, so i went ahead and got an audigy 2 zs. sounds decent, 7.1 sound, does well with games. tom's did a review back in october, <A HREF="http://www20.tomshardware.com/video/20031007/audigy-05.html" target="_new">here</A> is a link to it.

if you are willing to spend more, especially if listening to music is what you will mainly do, there are higher end audiophile cards out there that sound better. i dont enough experience with those to comment.

 

[Alendri]

Well an extigy is out my price range, but an external Audigy 2 (dont know the prices on the internal ones) I could buy.

The computer is mainly a server (storage, printer, keeping the connection open etc), used for all kinds of multimedia, music and movie watching, but also used as a gaming computer when there are more people here than computers. And if I get some decent sound I sure will move my gaming habbits to that computer instead. The computer is also used for some music and movie editing aswell.

It's a 2400+ AMD with 1 gig 333mhz ddr. It has USB 2.0 but no firewire connectors.

//Alendri

 

[Mindwarper]

Does your amp have digital inputs? I would get a M-audio revolution and hook it to my amp via optical digital. Keeps surround, and sound great.

Asus p4533c 2.53,4x512 1066,40gb system ,240Gb RAID A/V Drive,80 Gb Export,Radeon 9800 Pro,Matrox Rt.X100,Santa Cruz Turtle Beach,Aardvark Aark 20,Ricoh Mp5125a,Samsung 40x cd,Antec w/400,Xp pro

 

[ReDVsion]

Another option would be the Chantech AV-710. It's about $25 and competes with the M-Audio Revo for sound quality. Also, if you're not too heavily into gaming and can handle a slight performance hit, don't get an Audigy card. The ouput quality is extremely overrated.