Digital Sound, Hdmi, And The Merits Of 4 Vs 5 Speakers.

[bigonroad]

Hi there,

I'm planning on building a new PC soon, with an ASUS H81M-PLUS motherboard.

I currently use an external USB DAC into my seperates system for sound - and its great. But I use a 2 channel amp with two sets of speakers wired up in parallel. It sounds fantastic for music, but for stuff like films and games it loses a lot of directional data - because its still just a 2 channel setup.

So I'm planning on getting a 5.1 surround amp, and then running the sound in through that - but I'm not very up to date with digital audio.

1. What is the best option?

• Optical Out
• HDMI Out
• USB DAC

Are modern motherboards better shielded, and presumeably digital outputs less effected by noise? My old PC, with a DP43TF motherboard, gave awful sound on the analog outputs, hence using the DAC.

2. If I use HDMI, will I be able to use the onboard sound HDMI output at the same time as using an standalone graphics card (960 GTX) for my graphics? If I have to use the graphics card output, will it still be routed through the motherboard sound circuits?

3. Finally, is it worth upgrading to 5 channel and getting a center speaker? Does anyone there use a 4 channel setup for gaming here - with decent speaker positioning, is the lack of a center speaker even that noticeable?

Thanks for the help!
Chris

 

[Big B]

If your amp has an HDMI passthrough, you should be able to run the HDMI from the video card through it and use the sound on the amp. HDMI is primarily video, but to simplify things, audio channels are run through HDMI technology. I could be wrong, but I don't believe you will find an HDMI-connected speaker set. Some motherboards have their on-board audio boxed off from the rest of the motherboard (Gigabyte does this a lot) or have a separate sound card included in the motherboard package, although these tend to be higher-end models.
It might be considerably less complicated to buy a traditional internal sound card. M-Audio and Asus Xonar (higher-end models, the DG I have is very basic) might be something to look into, possibly Creative's X-Fi line.
Audio hasn't been my forte, but things have improved. Some motherboards offer digital out, but the state of on-board has improved.