Home Theater PC sound

[wealreadyhaveamember]

I have been looking around the htpc forums on other sites trying to figure out how to exactly get sound out of the htpc.

I dislike redundant hardware. I already have a good A/V reciever (rxv-2400), that does all the decoding that I want. So, I don't want to purchase a sound card to do my D2A conversion for a CD. From what I here, the boards are either too buggy, the drivers bad, or the noise levels too high.

What I really want is to be able to play a DVD and have it go through the motherboards SPDIF port directly the receiver and have the receiver do the work to decode it.
I also want to be able to play a CD and have the motherboard not convert it to 48 kHz. Anybody kow how to do this? Basically I want to get the music out of the htpc in the same format as it would come out of a digital connector from the back of a CD player.

Also I might want to rip all of my CD's to the hard drive (probably using itunes and Apple's lossless codec). The problem is from what I've heard, the motherboard upsamples the music from 44.1 kHz to 48 Khz. I don't think I want that either. Or maybe I do, since I don't know how itunes would output the music. Can anybody clear this up for me?

 

[varkeast]

if you are planning on a PC and not a MAC, one option you have is the chaintech av-710. this card costs around $30 and gives you an optical sp/dif connection to your receiver. you can use an output format called ASIO that bypasses all the built-in decoders and mixers in windows and outputs a bit-perfect copy to the receiver for decoding. All the resampling you speak of doesn't really take place on the motherboard, but in the OS. This isn't an encoding format like the apple lossless, just a method of playing. to gain this with the chaintech card you must use a driver called asio4all, or you can get a more expensive card (~100) that has built in asio support.

 

[docferdie]

Another alternative is the M-audio transit. It also allows bit-perfect pass-through for PCM streams. It also supports dolby digital pass through but is a little bit more painful to do. I wouldn't use it as a solitary sound card. I have yet to find a sound card that bypasses kmixer, is great for games and is painless for DVD pass-through.

 

[wealreadyhaveamember]

I have yet to find a sound card that bypasses kmixer, is great for games and is painless for DVD pass-through.

Thanks guys. When you do find the above mentioned sound card, please let us all know! I don't think I'm going to build my htpc until something like it, or a couple reasonably priced products that do all three, is available.

 

[varkeast]

i got a chaintech from www.newegg.com for $27 but it looks like they are out right now