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Any benefit from Dedictated sound card optical out VS MB integrated optical out

post #1 of 10
8/14/05 at 9:27am
Thread Starter 
I have a MSI motherboard that has the RealTek ALC655 integrated sound card with digital optical out. I'm planning on buying an external DAC (probably the VAC1 from Island Audio). My question is, are there any benefits (sound quality difference) if I get a dedictated sound card like the popular AV700 or the EMU 1212m (which I have but decided I want Ext. DAC instead ) just for their optical out?

Thanks
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post #2 of 10
8/14/05 at 1:38pm
Your realtek MB sound is AC97 compliant, meaning that it resamples all audio to 48khz, reducing sound quality. Plus, the AL655 uses an internall PLL Clock generator, meaning there will be more jitter than the EMU series and other crystal synched sound cards (whether you could actually hear a difference from the increased jitter is up to debate). Finally, I'm not sure if the realtek can bypass kmixer, windows volume control, which reduces the the signal approximately down to 14 bit for 16 bit sources. ASIO or Kernel Streaming support is needed to bypass kmixer.

Overall, if you're considering using an external DAC I would recommend purchasing a new sound card if you are not keeping your 1212m. You want to get all the potential out of the DAC by giving it a decent source signal. I would recommend the AV-710 if you're thinking about using an external DAC. Hope this helps.
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post #3 of 10
8/14/05 at 2:01pm
AV-710 is the best bang for your buck.
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post #4 of 10
8/14/05 at 6:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by tschanrm
Your realtek MB sound is AC97 compliant, meaning that it resamples all audio to 48khz, reducing sound quality. Plus, the AL655 uses an internall PLL Clock generator, meaning there will be more jitter than the EMU series and other crystal synched sound cards (whether you could actually hear a difference from the increased jitter is up to debate).
AC97 does *not* mean mandatory resampling to 48 kHz, at least not with contemporary AC97 2.1 compliant codecs. It's because of this that the codec needs a PLL at all, to synthesize all the frequencies required. I have only one card that uses a PLL, a Terratec Base1 with a cheapie AD1816 all-in-one ISA codec. Nice zoo of high-order harmonics that's only seen when routing the output to another card, a loopback won't show these so I strongly suspect these are jitter artifacts. The same phenomenon, yet more pronounced, can also be observed with CMedia cheapies (which, as it happens, also use a PLL - no wonder these don't pass udial.wav). I do hope the 0404 uses a more sophisticated design here...
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post #5 of 10
8/14/05 at 6:24pm
Thread Starter 
So there is no difference in the optical out of the AV710 vs the EMU 1212m.
If so then I'm returning my EMU and buy the AV700 (save $150 bucks) and put that toward the VDA-1.

Is that a good idea?
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post #6 of 10
8/14/05 at 6:46pm
Wasn't the AV-710 only bit-perfect when reflashing it and using drivers from some other Envy24HT card?
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post #7 of 10
8/14/05 at 7:56pm
Thread Starter 
I have another question. Do you think mp3's encoded on 128 - 192 (file size) will benefit from using the DVA-1 or are the quality on those files just not good enough to hear any increase in sound quality at all?
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post #8 of 10
8/14/05 at 8:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sirnice
I have another question. Do you think mp3's encoded on 128 - 192 (file size) will benefit from using the DVA-1 or are the quality on those files just not good enough to hear any increase in sound quality at all?
Nope, you want to rip your music collection using flac at best, mp3 lame extreme at worst (or another lossy format in high setting like AAC or ogg).

If your music source is 128-192, I would re-rip it all.
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post #9 of 10
8/15/05 at 3:11am
Quote:
AC97 does *not* mean mandatory resampling to 48 kHz, at least not with contemporary AC97 2.1 compliant codecs.
Yeah, you're right, I was thinking along the lines of AC97 1.x, which the ALC655 certainly is not.
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post #10 of 10
8/15/05 at 9:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Asmo
Nope, you want to rip your music collection using flac at best, mp3 lame extreme at worst (or another lossy format in high setting like AAC or ogg).

If your music source is 128-192, I would re-rip it all.
I would agree that re-riping and encoding is a good idea, but I would not say that 192VBR doesnt benifit from a better DAC.
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