Looking for a new DDL/DTSC card (non-Creative)

A

Auric

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 27, 2003
Messages
468
I'm currently using a X-Fi Titanium HD with DTS-encoded output to my receiver on a Win7x64 system, and I'm just about fed up with Creative's shitty drivers. Putting the system to sleep never works properly; either the system doesn't go to sleep or the card won't play any sound until I switch modes. Switching modes runs about a 50/50 chance of throwing a BSOD. Sometimes, the card will cause a BSOD for no discernible reason. I'm convinced this is spite.

Anyway, I'd like to replace the Titanium HD with something with a semblance of reliability. My primary application is gaming. It needs to have DD and/or DTS encoding capability, be able to come out sleep mode properly, and it would be awesome if it would only crash my system say once a month.

I haven't kept up with the latest sound cards. If you have a suggestion that frees me from Creative's yoke, I will be eternally grateful.
 
Xonar DX supports both, not sure about the lower-end Asus cards (like the D1 or the DS). Does your video card support HDMI audio output? That would be better, if your receiver supports it, than DDL/DTS.
 
+1 on the DX. Unless you can go HDMI. Seems like kind of a waste of a good sound card to just use it's digital outs.
 
Yeah, just use a video card with audio out over HDMI. HDMI can handle multichannel PCM from a game, no need to real-time encode to DDL or DTS Connect.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, all. I decided to give the HDMI out on my 460GTX a try, but it seems that is also not without issues. The first problem I ran into is that it is apparently not possible to send only audio over HDMI; the video card insists on treating the receiver as a monitor. As I already have two monitors and the card does not support three, this was a problem. I ended up using a HDMI to DVI cable to connect my second monitor to the receiver.

The second problem is apparently a common complaint with NVidia cards: the so-called "silent stream" bug. The card only sends an audio signal to the receiver when sound is actually playing. Without a signal, the receiver will not stay in multi-channel PCM mode. Upon receiving a signal again, the receiver takes about a second to switch modes.

At the moment, I'm working around the issue by continually running a silent WAV file in the background, but this is far from ideal. If a better fix for this issue doesn't become available, I may have to look into the Asus cards.
 
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