Gaming sound card question (hardware processing)

[ToxicBug]

Hello,

I have an X-Fi Titanium HD. My question is the following. If I'm playing a game and my sound card is using hardware processing (EAX or other), can I output this via optical (Toslink) S/PDIF to an external DAC (such as a Schiit Bifrost) and have it do the D/A conversion?

Thanks!

[DTS]

That hardware processing is nothing to do with DAC is it? So why wouldn't that work? I don't know why you want to use a seperate DAC than whatever the card has built in, though. Your sound system a long way from your PC?

An advantage of using optical out would be that you could have surround sound through it with only one cable.

Why don't you just use an amplifier that has optical in? Seperate DACs seem a folly to me.

[Foo]

Yes Toxic, you can. My knowledge of DACs is a bit limited but:

The X-Fi uses a Burr-Brown PCM 1794A DAC, and the Schiit Bifrost uses AKM4399 (out of the box). Compare those 2 DACs and decide which one you prefer, I guess.

The x-fi is shielded but an external DAC's likely to suffer less interference than any internal card.

[ToxicBug]

Foo, the DAC's performance isn't just related to the D/A chip. It's also heavily influenced by the analog output stage.

Why would I want a separate DAC? Because it will probably sound better than my X-Fi, and it also might have less noise. It also gives me more flexibility than an amp/DAC combo. This is for headphones BTW, if I had a surround sound system then it might have been a different story.

Thanks guys!

[DTS]

Damn, now you've got me wondering if I should use a separate DAC to connect my PC to my hi-fi.

I mainly play MP3s, Quake3 and emulators on my PC. Occasionally a DVD, but I don't have many DVDs and might not get many more cause they've been superceded by BDs, and I don't want to have to re-buy loads of films later when I switch to BD. (PAL (my region) DVDs upscaled to 1080p won't look much good cause they are 576p, compared to NTSC (America, Japan) DVDs which are 540p which doubles nicely to 1080p. Yeah, PAL regions got a raw deal with the HD standard.)
Would a seperate DAC make that much difference for me? (My hi-fi is stereo, btw.)

The highest sound quality things I play on my PC are DVDs, right? Q3 isn't that high sound quality, and some DVDs have more channels, fed into stereo the quality is still there. Would I get a massive increase in sound quality that would make it worth it for DVDs sounding better? How much can Q3 sound be improved? I think the main problem with my PC sound is the fan is noisy, a seperate DAC might increase the quality somewhat, but that fan would still be making noise spoling it.

[ToxicBug]

Damn, now you've got me wondering if I should use a separate DAC to connect my PC to my hi-fi.

I mainly play MP3s, Quake3 and emulators on my PC. Occasionally a DVD, but I don't have many DVDs and might not get many more cause they've been superceded by BDs, and I don't want to have to re-buy loads of films later when I switch to BD. (PAL (my region) DVDs upscaled to 1080p won't look much good cause they are 576p, compared to NTSC (America, Japan) DVDs which are 540p which doubles nicely to 1080p. Yeah, PAL regions got a raw deal with the HD standard.)
Would a seperate DAC make that much difference for me? (My hi-fi is stereo, btw.)

The highest sound quality things I play on my PC are DVDs, right? Q3 isn't that high sound quality, and some DVDs have more channels, fed into stereo the quality is still there. Would I get a massive increase in sound quality that would make it worth it for DVDs sounding better? How much can Q3 sound be improved? I think the main problem with my PC sound is the fan is noisy, a seperate DAC might increase the quality somewhat, but that fan would still be making noise spoling it.

Your DAC will make most of your files sound better. I mostly listen to 320kbps MP3 or FLAC and IMO these formats show the difference between DACs quite well, especially FLAC. I think sounds in Quake 3 might be 128 kbps, so even with a nice DAC they'll sound Lo-Fi. It will definitely have a different sound signature though.

Are you using on-board audio right now? If yes, then I think that you'll notice improvement with any $80+ internal sound card.

If you already have an internal sound card, the question is: how good is your stereo? Do you think it resolves enough so that you can hear the difference between your sound card and a decent external DAC?

[DTS]

I looked at 2 Q3A sound files and they are
Wave, PCM, 16 bit, 22050 Hz, 352 kps, mono.
Who knows how many such files would be playing at once in a game, though?