Question SPDIF vs. 3.5 audio jacks on x670e motherboards

[jhferry]

Shopping for these boards is puzzling. Especially when looking at $500 boards that removed most of the audio jacks. I have some general questions.

I have my current 2.1 setup going to my SPDIF port. It was always my understanding that this was a better connection than 3.5. It was also better to remove noise and was digital.

I see a lot of PC users using the 3.5 ports and always wondered why. Is the sound more on par with SPDIF than I thought?

Last, some of these boards have the same audio chipset but some are 7.1, some are 5.1. I always assumed that all SPDIF connections if plugged into a receiver, would support 5.1 or 7.1 over that connection. The board manuals mention needed a front panel card to support 5.1/7.1. Does SPDIF not always support at least 5.1?

 

[boju]

Normally optical is limited to 2.1ch lossless (fine for your setup though) unless there's real time encoder on board (Dolby Digital Live) encoding stereo to 5.1 on the fly like DDL sound cards do. Dts Connect is another technology that does similar but think DDL is a bit better. Without compression done to source audio (ie games, and i think majority of games use wav format, so too big for optical as a carrier for multi 5.1 ch lossless audio), you're chancing if game audio is already compressed to fit multi channels down the line of the limited bandwidth optical cable. Reason why Hdmi superceded optical for higher bandwidth.

Now with 3.5mm audio jacks, over the many many years of using this connection have i ever noticed distortion or not so good sound. I use Hdmi audio as well to an Avr for various things and i couldn't tell the difference. Maybe you can. Besides audio quality, I don't think you can equalise optical audio like you can with analogue? Don't think so but could be wrong. But if you can't, unequalised sound is pretty bland.

If you plan on having 5.1/7.1 pc speakers some day, it'll be much easier using 3.5mm jacks. Unless you run through an Avr then you could use your graphics card audio instead.