Turtle Beach TBS-3300-01 Montego DDL Sound Card

[oogabooga]

I have a Klipsch Promedia GMX D-5.1 speaker system. I bought a Monster Cables THX Certified TOSLINK Cable (Optical Cable) for it and I am using my motherboards onboard audio which is Realtek AC97'.

Now i want to upgrade my soundcard to decrease the load on my processor and also to enhance performance. My main use for the soundcard is for Movies and music.

I was looking into buying the X-Fi or the Audigy series but none of them offer support for TOSLINK except the X-Fi but thats only if I buy the higher version which comes with the front rackmount which has the TOSLINK connector and that too will only be 2.1 channel sound so I guess that Creative is no longer an option?

I was reading some of the posts here and somebody was raving about the Turtlebeach Montego so I looked into it and it looks as if it has all the features I am looking for. I need to get your opinion on this card and its perfomance? Have any of you used this card? What is the sound quality like?

Also I have some unrelated questions which unfortunately are beyond me due to my limited knowledge of Sound Cards and emerging technologies in this arena.

I was reading up about different cards on the internet and I saw that most of them offer different versions of Dolby surround for example: Dolby Surround Live and Dolby Prologic. But my speaker system (Klipsch Promedia GMX D-5.1) also offeres Dolby PLII and Dolby SRS. So what I was thinking is that how can my speaker system offer versions of Dolby? Does it have a builtin processor or something?

Please excuse my ignorance, I am just a NOOB =). Your suggestions and help is very much appreciated! Thankyou in advance.

 

[Crashman]

Someone was passing around a review of an earlier card that used the same sound chip, the reviewers liked it.

I believe the Tosslink from a Creative card will output pre-recorded 5.1 sound, such as used in MOVIES, but only 2.1 from CD-Audio. Gah... .1 means nothing, it's just a low-frequency crossover from the front channels.

Anyway, yes, Creative doesn't encode 5.1 into digital on-the-fly, it only provides 5.1 digital output for stuff that's pre-encoded like movies.

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