Analog or Digital

[maface]

How do people have their speakers hooked up to their sound cards? I use analog instead of digital I think it sounds better agree? disagree?

Thanks

[John Prophet]

could depend on the source of the original music. If its games and stuff that has sound that was always digital to start with then digital may be best....but if its classical music or old school rock stuff..maybe analog.

(I promise you my ears arent good enough to know the difference and Im an advanced guitarist, lol)

[pinipig523]

depends on teh soundcard. on my audigy2ZS, i like to use the digital out for music and movies, while using the analog (6channel) for games. i have all of this hooked up to my yamaha rxv530 receiver which is then hooked to 4 yamaha towers and an infinity 12" 500watt subwoofer.

digital has better sound.

btw, digital for games? no way - you cant have eax enabled that way. sucks.

[Kc2iLq]

I use the digital output of my audigy to the coaxial input of my receiver. I never tried the 6-ch input, but I don't see how it could be better. Besides, who wants to have three cables going from the sound card to the receiver?
On a side note, I just set up a spare rockford fosgate 301s 900watt sub amp with a 12" xplod sub to handle the bass. To put it lightly, I thought it was going to tear my walls down at first. The only really annoying part is that I need to run my 75Amp power supply whenever I feel like blasting my music. Just a slight tangent...

-Kc2iLq

[[Neo770]]

I hook my speakers up with analague because thats all they support.

[Zitch]

It really depends on the soundcard and what you want to do.
I'm assuming I have a receiver with 6 speakers hooked up to the soundcard.

For Digital: I think only the higher end Nforce and Nforce2 motherboards onboard soundcard has the ability to ENCODE 5.1 Dobly Digital on the fly. All other soundcards (that I know of) has to downgrade to 2 channels to send sound digitally, so you lose some positional ability for sound in games. On DVD soundtracks, most soundcards can simply send the sound info (whether 5.1 DD or DTS) directly to the receiver through the digital link, so the receiver does the decoding.

For Analog: You don't lose positional ability on the majority of soundcards in games. But you have the 6-wire mess instead of the 1-wire mess to deal with, and you have more of a chance of interference occuring on an analog link. In most cases though, the interference is very minor, if there is any.

So, if I had any of the NForce boards (or a soundcard) that can do 5.1 encoding, I would go with all digital. Otherwise the following is what I would do:

For games: Analog. Positional sound is so freaking cool. You lose that in the conversion to Pro Logic II then back again.

For music: slight leaning towards Digital. Only reason for this is to reduce the chance of interference. Almost all (modern) music is based on 2 channel Pro Logic II. You can get 5.1 music, and those you would have to use digital to get the full effect.

For movies: Digital. I have my systems setup to directly pass the DD or DTS signal directly to the Receiver. DVD software can decode this signal to send over a 6-wire analog system, but, again the interference possibility creeps in, and also, why make the computer do the work when the receiver is perfectly happy to do it for me...

I hope that Nvidia can make a separate daughter board (read: PCI card) version of their onboard sound system. That would really simplify how I set my system up...

[pinipig523]

6channel (on the receiver) is better for games because this utilized the analog outputs on the soundcard, thus, it can utilize EAX - which is what games use for positioning effects.

with digital, there is no eax support, hence, no way to get true surround sound for gaming. you can use prologicII, but this blows compared to eax.

[shahani]

Depends on the sound card, quality of music and speakers. With a reasonable card, 192 kb/s bitrate and Bose speakers, you should get CD quality sound using digital cable connection.

I don't even connect the analog cable to the CD drive.

[hifiben]

On my hifi system analog seems to give off more bass and digital sounds a bit more "refined" so I also use analog for music plus high resolution audio - sacd and dvd-a only uses analog atm. This is all just my opinion through critical listening on my system, you should use whatever sounds best to you.

[thePh@r@oh]

as a musician i love analog because it gives subtle warmth to your sound. the band i was in recorded an album digitally ans we were never happy with it