Dolby Live - Is it worth it?

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jimmyb

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May 24, 2006
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I'm looking to get a new soundcard sometime soon. I'm wondering, is there any benefit to having dolby live ( -- realtime dolby digital encoding -- ) on it? As far as I can tell, it might actually decrease my sound quality since all outgoing audio is transcoding into a lossy format.

I'm using a pass-through cable for DVDs obviously.

Thanks.
 
Hi:

See sig.

The TB/C-Media software puts a Control Panel applet in systray, Start Menu and Control Panel. You can call up the panel and select between 2 or 5.1 channel along with other settings as you wish.
Whichever you choose is default until you change it.

My method of using the Montego may be different from what you may need to do.
I use the S/PDIF Optical OUT at 48Hz to my Denon receiver and when I enable DDL
on the Montego, the Denon detects the Dolby compression and decodes it properly to my speaker array. I don't use the analog audio OUTs.
I use DDL 5.1 only when gaming (mostly bf1942 and variants) and it works well.
I only listen to music as it was produced to be heard.
That almost always means 2 channel stereo and that is how I play it.
The Montego just passes that through to my receiver "as is" just fine.
If the source (music, movies etc) is already Dolby or DTS encoded, I just send that unaltered 2 channel signal to my receiver for decoding.

I have the same card in another virtually identical MCE2005 system (but for a Sony HD TV, Hauppauge USB2 tuner) and it works just fine too. When I've tried encoding TV with DDL there are no noticeable sync issues.

Around the time when I was installing the cards, there were some complaints in a few forums about bugs in the TB software (since fixed I believe) so I used the software from C-Media [8768_20051116.zip].
Works fine so I've not tried to update the software/drivers from either source.

There are other more elaborate/expensive cards out there with C-Media chips around (also one with DTS encoding) but this one suits me. YMMV.

The Montego is also smaller than some of the competitor's which I found handy too.

TB has a good reputation for good sound cards and don't bloat up your registry or force features onto your system you will never need.
The card is inexpensive, works ok for me and it isn't Creative.

Happy trailz,
 
Thanks for the info.

Does anyone have information on potential quality loss involved with transcoding to DD? The bitrate is quite low, especially for 6 channels, and it's a fairly old codec too.
 
jimmyb said:
Thanks for the info.

Does anyone have information on potential quality loss involved with transcoding to DD? The bitrate is quite low, especially for 6 channels, and it's a fairly old codec too.
Click to expand...

Well they now have a DTS version if you are worried about bit-rate issues. I had a DDL card, it wasn't bad, just not hardware accelerated. You can always switch to PCM for music for uncompressed audio. The only time you really need DDL is for games and games do not use high quality audio anyways.

I would use analog input if you have them, if not a DTS/DD live card would be fine. You won't notice a quality decrease.
 
Thanks for the reply.

I'm using the z-5500 from Logitech, so analog is an option (it is what I am using right now).

I got them fairly recently and have been thinking about moving over to DDL (or DTS "Live" as you mentioned). I can't seem to find a single advantage to doing so though (sound quality wise). I'm still getting 5.1 sound with games... right? and I can use a digital pass-through for DVDs.

At this point I think I will likely just get a sound card with better quality than my bollocks integrated setup.
 
I got them fairly recently and have been thinking about moving over to DDL (or DTS "Live" as you mentioned). I can't seem to find a single advantage to doing so though (sound quality wise). I'm still getting 5.1 sound with games... right? and I can use a digital pass-through for DVDs.
Click to expand...

IMO you should just get a X-Fi extreme music and just hook up your Z-5500 using the analog cables. There is little point in using the digital input on your Z-5500 with your computer (in this case digital and analog will produce the same quality using the X-Fi). You will still get 5.1 with games and movies, only difference is you will use Creative's built-in DTS/DD decoder instead of Logitech's decoder. This way you still get full hardware acceleration too.
 
DDL benefits in games.

how much does it benefit depend on the game. DDL sounds good in some games and horrible in others.

i just decided to not worry about it and got an X-Fi. my games all sound consistent and the extra cables to my receiver/decoder dont bother me

edit: my ears cant notice the difference between using the X-Fi and using a DDL card with DDL encoding neables. once again my ears are not your ears
 
That's what I thought. Plus you get to avoid a lossy transcode with analog.

Anyway, I've discovered that I can't use the Creative card due to lack of Linux drivers (tentatively to be released 2nd QTR 07). I need something that will work in a dual-boot setup. I've been reading excellent things about the m-audio revolution (7.1 or 5.1).

Can anyone vouche for this card, or recommend something else given my constraints?
 
i can honestly say that aside from the lack of the very specific feature that i bought a sound card for (DDL), the revolution 7.1 sounds very good for stereo playback.

MP3s sound good. it seems to makes the cymbol hits more crisp than that onboard i was using. for 128 kb/s mp3s cymbol hits always sounded too washy for my liking.

AACs sound good. it's harder to point to a specific difference, but they seem to sound just a little bit fuller.

games sound the same. i purchased a dedicated sound card to improve this, and as mentioned previously, i'm annoyed at the lack of the features and improvement that i was looking for. for all of their shortcomings, creative cards seem to be the best supported by game developers.

i will say that the 15/50 usecond emphasis (frequency biasing) on my older audiophile really makes the high and low end pop out above and beyond what the revolution offers in my present config, but the audiophile does not do any stereo to surround coding at all. it's honestly the best audio i have head for music playback on a computer.
 
It could sound better than analog, depending on the quality of the analog section (DACs and op amps mostly) of the sound card.
 
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