Sound card as a pre amp? Vs HT amp? + the ageold stereo performance debate.

[chug]

A quick back story, its a bedroom system that I tried to upgrade to surround sound from a Musical Fidelity stereo amp to a Sony DEH800 only to ruin music performance. So the Sony has been replaced with a Teac A-H500i, and I'm picking up a LS800 5.1 setup.

Now I have 2 options here, pickup a lovely matching Teac 550 av amp, and use the preouts for the stereo. Would this hinder stereo performance is the source is going through the AV amp first despite only playing stereo? Output would be digital and I guess using the 550's DAC. Probably not the best idea?

Next is to get a 3 channel power amp, use the 500 for the fronts, and get a good quality sound card for the decoding and to give analogue outputs direct to each amp. Probably the best bet here? Gets all the modern decoding. My music source is the computer anyway. I don't have any other sources other than the TV which can stay stereo I guess (rare to watch it anyway)

Been looking at an Asus D2x if anyone has any experience in these? Gets good reviews, has its own case, very good SNR. On the computer forums they say it's better than a HT's preamp unless serious wedge is spent? What do the AV lot think?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[chug]

The Asus STX also looks very good, givng full rca 7.1 out via an expansion card, expensive, but could it be worth it? Seems it is a few years old. How would it react to as modern bluray type format?

 

[Grador]

I do not recommend using a soundcard as a preamp. There are to many ways this could go wrong and cause damage somewhere down the line. As an example, many poweramps achieve full output around 1v input and many sound cards will happily go to 2v output. If for some reason the volume on the soundcard got cranked you could very easily send a very distorted high power signal to your speakers.

 

[chug]

I had thought of that, especially since the power amp doesn't have any volume knobs on the front, separate items would be a pain. Just thought it could be modulated via the pc remote/mouse, but when I think of the amount of times things have already popped up loudly as it is. You're definitely right, it isn't worth the risk.

The units I'm looking at don't have any of the newer features, one has a full set of preouts, the other has a multi channel in, but no preouts, so the card could do the decoding. Could send the front rca's to the stereo amp, still the same volume issue. Or use the multi channel in, wire both amps to the front speakers and make sure only one amp is used at a time. Involves setting up different outputs on the card which could be a pain.

What does everyone else do? New HT amp with good stereo performance I assume?