DTS/DD Live vs good analog DAC's

[lowfat]

Some good points were made in Sen's X-Fi thread about DTS/Dolby Digital compression. and i would actually like to hear people's thoughts a bit more.

Voodoo Rufus mentioned that DDL is "still essentially a lossy, mp3 based codec right" which is true. As it had a bandwidth of ~400kb/s. A CD uses about 1600kbs. So oviously its compressed quite a bit.

Now here is the question, why do people insist that Dolby Digital Live sounds better (including myself) than good analog DAC's?

[zabomb4163]

not sure about others but....i dont use DAC's on my sound card. signal gets passed straight to the receiver.

[Ryan T]

I think some of the draw to DDL is for those people hooking up a home theater type system to a computer. I dont know about you but I would much rather have one optical or coax cable than 3 analog cables. Now whether it sounds as good as an analog DAC on a card would depend on that card obviously :D. But most people I assume will only be using DDL for gaming and in my experience your usually focused more on whats happening on the screen than on the audio. If the DDL is done well I think it would be very acceptable for games. With movies the true DD signal (or DTS) signal should be passed through the sound card when using the digital out. For music most would usually choose stereo anyway so again the full unmodified signal would pass through.

Honestly I havnt heard a DDL card yet. I think the idea is a great one though. I've hooked my system up to my home theater setup several times and its always a pain to use analog cables and never seemed to sound right. Over the digital connection it was always a lot more impressive. But if DDL is really compressed maybe it wouldnt be any different. I just tend to trust my DAC's in my receiver a lot more than I do than the ones on my sound card. But agian if the DD encoding is bad to begin with the good DAC's in my receiver would be useless ;).



Ryan

[R4z0r4mu5 Pr|m3]

how good a receiver would you need to have the DACs sound better than on most or all soundcards? any suggestions or recommendations for these receivers?

[Ryan T]

Honestly unless you did a true blind test its hard to say if some of the sound card DAC's are better or worse than a receiver. I was never terribly impressed with my audigy 2 ZS. It sounded pretty good but I expected more. From my own limited subjective testing I prefered my H/K receiver over the audigy analog outputs.

There are a lot of very high end cards out there though. Especially in the pro audio market that have VERY good DAC's so I dont think this is an easy question to answer. I would think just about mid line receiver from a good company would better the DAC's in most audigy style cards. But again without any real testing it would be hard to judge.


Ryan

[Voodoo Rufus]

The only decent sound cards I've had were my Soundstorm and my Philips Acoustic Edge. So I have no experience with DDL or digital outputs. At home we use the stereo analog outs on our DVD player. The DACs on my Philips were good, but the Soundstorm boards I've had (Asus A7N8X Dlx 2.0 and my current LanParty B) have been decent as well. The LPB is arguably better and on par with my Philips.

It all depends on the source material. If I'm listening to a CD on my computer, I want the best darn DACs a sound card can offer (the only reason I'd ever consider an X-Fi Elite Pro), or I'll want to shove it via PCM to a good external DAC. MP3s and movies I don't care so much because the source isn't as good anyway. For games, most often they use compressed sounds anyway, so again it doesn't matter so much. Since one cannot play SACDs on computers yet, I'd be stuck with outboard anyway in the future.