Hey all, new to the forums here :>
I don't know much about all the nice equipment and stuff that people use WRT audio, but I'm pretty sure that I know what I'm looking for! Could someone help me figure out if such a thing exists, which might be best, where to buy one, etc?
What I need is - some kind of device that accepts front/rear/LFE/etc/etc analog inputs (no digital stuff! this is what I'm trying to get away from - more on that in a sec) and can mix the audio for output to my ATH-A900X headphones, using all the channels.
I'm using digital stuff to do this right now, and I kind of hate it... I've got an Auzen X-Plosion 7.1 Cinema (CMI8770 chipset) sound card pumping digital audio (Dolby Digital Live encodes it on-chip) to my Turtle Beach Earforce DSS 7.1 "mixamp", which outputs it to my headphones all mixed and nice! I have numerous complaints with Dolby Digital though, but the main one that's been eating me alive for the longest time now is that Dolby and chipsets makers such as C-Media are utterly opposed to any kind of support for Linux. Therefore, I've been using a software AC3 encoder to encode all of my audio so that I can have similar quality to what my card outputs in Windows. Unfortunately, there is a TREMENDOUS (<a few ms, but still) lag involved in the process and, sadly, the only way I'm able to "properly" accomplish this involves messing with the audio before it is encoded. I'm losing so much quality... it's noticeable sometimes...
Anyway, my sound card also has socketed/replaceable OPAMPS. I truly believe that if I can get something to mix this audio from the analog source for my headphones that it will sound 100000% better than my current setup! It's not music that I'm after here - I'm fine with a lot of that being stereo. I want things to be as authentic as possible. I'm fussing over games and such, that actually do output 7.1 audio.
I'd appreciate any help at all trying to find a device that does this! For that matter, what is such a device called? :>
Thx
