[bpm2000]

Sorry about the cryptic title, ill try to clear up my question here:
I pretty much listen to only mp3s now, via my turtle beach santa cruz soundcard's digital out into my receiver's digital input, and from there out to speakers or the headphone jack.
Now I understand the sound would be different via different soundcards if I was listening directly out of the headphone out of the card itself, but how much of a differnce (if any) would I notice by switching cards if all I use is the digital output of it?

thx

 

[pbirkett]

It really depends on the quality of the sound card. Basically, if you intend to upgrade from the Turtle Beach, if you are going to use digital out you need to look for ones that dont resample the output to 48Khz for everything, like most of the consumer sound cards do. Once you have that, then its simply a comparison between the jitter levels of soundcards, but lower jitter does not neccesarily equate to a better sound. However, by and large, excepting the resampling issue, they mostly sound similar.

BTW, I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz connected via the digital out to my DAC. I also have a cheap Pioneer DVD player connected to the DAC. To my ears, the DVD player is noticably better, main difference being the lack of resampling, and also possibly, the better quality cable.

 

[NewSc2]

You probably won't hear too much of a difference unless you'd want to look into the really high-end sound cards.

 

[Moguta]

If you're just listening to downloaded MP3s, you probably won't want to upgrade your soundcard because the lessened distortion of better soundcards/speakers/phones will make the distortion, pre-echo, & other flaws in the MP3s themselves more noticable.

 

[lini]

bpm2000: Chances are, that it would sound worse, because the analog conversion would happen inside the pc with all it's parts causing considerable emi around.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[bpm2000]

thx for the replies.. guess ill put that money towards saving for some new cans instead

.