A beginner’s guide to soundcard connections

Oh and remember that some games that "feature" surround sound will NOT output it over digital connection, no matter how many dolby digital stickers there are on the game or your PC.

"Unlike an optical cable, coaxial cables make use of shielded copper rather than light." Seriously? Comparing the medium to the signal?
 
That Asus DX in the picture has optical output via an adaptor, not analogue only.
 
Where to get the toslink cable from had that capability for years but tried a few years ago to get the cable but could not find it because at that time optical was to new ??
 
T3rminator said:
Oh and remember that some games that "feature" surround sound will NOT output it over digital connection, no matter how many dolby digital stickers there are on the game or your PC.

"Unlike an optical cable, coaxial cables make use of shielded copper rather than light." Seriously? Comparing the medium to the signal?
Click to expand...

Not sure how that mistake made it back into the article. I already edited it out once. Anyway, fixed it again.
 
RaeesD said:
That Asus DX in the picture has optical output via an adaptor, not analogue only.
Click to expand...

Yup, and it's not the first time that mybroadband/mygaming made such a massive mistake either.
 
A beginner's guide??? The title of the article is *very* misleading.

A beginner's guide should be about the connectors on the right of the pic of the motherboard connectors...
 
Thanks for the article. Although some mistakes were made it was still informative!
 
Nice repost. Post padding is post padding. I can almost smell a Derrick article merely by looking at the article names already...

http://mygaming.co.za/news/hardware/14606-soundcard-connections-explained.html

As posted two weeks ago already.

And T3rminator, with Dolby Digital Live encoding you can still get 5.1 over coaxial/optical from any game supporting 5.1; the issue ends up being that if you're playing your game and decide to try plugging in your mobo or cheap(er) sound card's digital connection, 9 times out of 10 your onboard or sound card doesn't support live encoding and will output to 2.0 instead. With the DD Live Encoding it's supposed to be able to take the standard 5.1 output your computer provides and push it to the coaxial/optical connectors.

It's also possible on select few cards to get hardware decode and an optical/spdif input, such as on some Turtle Beach cards, the two Auzentech? theatre cards (agrippa? and some other card), as well as some of the X-Fi and Asus Xonar cards, so one can connect a XBOX360 or PS3 to these to get AC3 passthrough and/or decode to analogue 5.1 for either console and have the cards hand that off to the analogue 5.1

*edit* didn't elaborate as to the DD live's method of operation as I haven't had it on my own computer before and so don't know what one needs to do to set it up, but I believe it does actually work. in fact, I believe my computer's supposed to have DD Live for the onboard, so I may go plug it up to our sound system sometime soon™ and test it out for myself

also, dolby digital headphone is awesome. same tech as used in the logitech G35 and G930 headsets for their emulated surround sound
 
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nanonyous said:
Nice repost. Post padding is post padding.
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Not everyone frequents both sites, so content from one will be shared on the other. Two of my articles were published on MyGaming recently, if memory serves.
 
Why not post the same article to both sites simultaneously then... when it's this delayed it feels like a matter of "nothing to post today... what article have I not cross-posted yet... oh, this one should work!"

Anyway, you went into sufficient detail with this one, and although I didn't read through the whole thing to notice the mistakes others are talking about, I found nothing wrong with the core info along the top and bottom. I think.
 
nanonyous said:
Why not post the same article to both sites simultaneously then... when it's this delayed it feels like a matter of "nothing to post today... what article have I not cross-posted yet... oh, this one should work!"

Anyway, you went into sufficient detail with this one, and although I didn't read through the whole thing to notice the mistakes others are talking about, I found nothing wrong with the core info along the top and bottom. I think.
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The mistakes have been fixed. Apart from the Xonar DX description still saying analogue only :mad:

This article did show up on the MyBB front page when it first appeared on Mygaming by the way, in the "Mygaming news" section...
 
nanonyous said:
Anyway, you went into sufficient detail with this one, and although I didn't read through the whole thing to notice the mistakes others are talking about, I found nothing wrong with the core info along the top and bottom. I think.
Click to expand...

This one wasn't mine, it was Derrick's :-) I was just illustrating that it's not just Derrick's articles that are syndicated.
 
Okay, I thought you were Derrick using a different nick - in essence I was addressing him.

TJ99, I realise so, it's why I knew about it and why I linked the mygaming one, but the mygaming news frame on mybb isn't as prominent as 'headlines' and the recent articles frame.

Also, amusing fact, the Creative Labs Audigy SE Value! card, despite looking like it only has four analogue ports, has a mini-toslink in 3.5mm jack format. Apparently many motherboards also have these in their 3.5mm jack-stack, even if the stack's appearance isn't any different from one without. You can also connect an s/pdif bracket (hint: you can technically just use a standard RCA female jack and jury-rig it onto one of those silly little cables that comes with most DVD drives, then find the s/pdif header on your mobo) to most modern motherboards that support 7.1 by default. I don't think Realtek makes codecs that don't allow for some form of digital connection anymore...
 
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