[wwmhf]

Hi,

I am planning to buy a sound card with good (or the best) digital out put. Good here means accuracy, low jitter, not too expensive, and many other criterions. The analogue out put quality is not the concern here. Also, stereo sound is what I am looking for. Multi-channel cards can be considered as long as they can produce good stereo sound.

Your comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Mr.Radar]

The digital output of the EMU 1212m is suppost to be very good, and pretty much all "Professional" soundcards above about $500 should be good transports.

 

[viper32]

What are you doing with the digital signal? Do you require Coax or Optical or both? Is the intention mainly for playback only, or do you make music? Most of the what I call really good cards with digital specs are multichannel.

If you want a good digital signal plus other nice input / output features. Look at the Soundblaster Audigy series of cards, or E-MU cards. What I use is the RME 9652 Hammerfall series. This card costs about $350 - 475 on ebay. But is mostly suited to multichannel studio work. There are others many other but without knowing a little more. It is hard for me to give a direction.

I hope this helps.

 

[Mr.Radar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by viper32 If you want a good digital signal plus other nice input / output features. Look at the Soundblaster Audigy series of cards,

This card's digital output is not bit perfect, which is NOT GOOD for any serious music listening or production. Even worse, it resamples the audio very poorly so don't expect good sound from this card. Also, it only has a coax-out which requires an adapter to use standard cables with. [Optical outputs are highly reccomended for digital audio output with computers so you don't pollute the ground of the DAC.] Even if it has good jitter specs (which it probably doesn't considering it's a consumer-grade card from Creative) the resampling still makes it nearly useless for anything but gaming and music. The EMU, however, has none of these issues and should make a nice transport.