Originally posted by: ArneBjarne
Originally posted by: Nebor
Originally posted by: ArneBjarne
Originally posted by: Auric
SoundStorm analog was crap -on par with average on-board software audio and worse than bargain-bin cards. Its sole redeeming feature was DICE, the quality of which is obviously not quite as good as uncompressed analog through a decent DAC. The drivers were reportedly only so-so as well, plus lacking full EAX compatibility. So let us not pretend it was so great.
I'll take my SoundStorm DD5.1 -> Yamaha DSP-A2 connection over an analogue connection you could make from a creative card. IMO you would have to use a much more expensive cable to compete, not to mention 6 of them instead of 1.
I just can't see any sound solution out there at the moment, that wouldn't be a step back in my setup compared to the SoundStorm.
No you wouldn't. That DD that your soundstorm uses is a lossy format. Any critical listening would reveal the lack of quality in music. You'd be better off using straight digital PCM for music than DD. Of course, if you're not talking about music, than sound quality isn't really THAT important, since the sources aren't great for games. Then consider that Creative cards have support for EAX 4.... and Creative wins.
I'm fully aware that DD is a lossy format along with SDDS and dts (atleast until dts lossless comes out). I'm still fully satisfied by the experience i get from them though, both on my home system (DVDs and gaming)* and at my work as a projectionist (movies).
In regards to music then sure use PCM, that is no problem for the SoundStorm. It just doesn't work for gaming since it only supports 2 channels.
EAX4? What good is it when you can only get 2 channels out on digital? To me it is completly useless. It is much more important to me to have 3D positional audio AND a way to transfer it digitally to my amp.
The loss in using DD compression is negligable, especially compared to the loss of quality involved in analogue transfer and use of soundcard DAC instead of the DAC in my amp. Creative wins? Personally I wouldn't dream of spending money on one of their cards before they implement hardware encoding.
*SoundStorm uses the maximum bitrate for AC3 640 kbit/s. For comparison most DVDs use 384 kbit/s and the maximum is 448 kbit/s. for DVDs.