[Spadge]

Hi there,

I'm fairly new to PC audio (my squeezebox doesn't count!) and am currently looking for a decent way to hook up my PC to my external DAC...

On my last PC I had onboard sound with the AC97 chips. Apparently using the optical output of these boards wasn't very good for various reasons...

I've since got a new computer and it has a Realteck High-def ALC889A chip. I'm just wondering if this is any better as a digital output device? Do these chips still upsample to 48khz?

Or would I be better to get a USB->SPDIF output converter?

Thanks for any advice
Paul

 

[Dave_M]

I was just wondering exactly the same thing just now. My codec is a Realtek ALC883. It supports 24/192 apparantly so I am keeping my fingers crossed.


I think how it works is the old AC'97 spec resamples everything to 48 KHz. But the new HD Audio if you play a 96 KHz sound file, then any other sounds played at the same time gets resamples to 96 KHz to match the 1st track that is playing. This is done by windows kmixer I belive. Makes sence? Someone please check I got this right, i'm not too sure.