Need help with upgrading soundcard and speakers

[jim1976]

Hi currently I have a SB ZxR attached to my trusty Z-906 and I'm quite happy with the result if you ask me but even me who I'm not a serious audiophile I feel that audio fidelity could improve without breaking the bank by thousand of dollars.
Upgrading is itching me though and I'm seriously thinking about AE-9 (and maybe change the opmaps as well but this is something I can do to my ZxR as well anyway) but I'm debating whether it would make a serious difference with these speakers.
I mean they are great vfm for music and gaming which are my top priorities (without music production) and surround gaming is really great with ZxR so if I'm to upgrade I'm thinking of changing speakers as well. I use my SN HD-650 as well and ZxR seems to be doing a good job driving them..
As I said I really like the surround 5.1 of the combo ZxR with Z-906 so if I'm to upgrade I'm gonna do it with both parts.
Question is.. Does it worth it to upgrade to a AE-9 from ZxR and can you help me choose a better 5.1/7.1 surround system than Z-906, that will actually make it a meaningful upgrade?


Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[ThisIsJimmy]

Hi Jim

As internal soundcards go, to be honest you have a capable card, with your only real internal upgrade option being the AE-9 over what you have now. I'm not sure that's justifiable though with your setup as beyond this you start looking at external AMPS and DACS. It all depends on your budget.

Being an owner of Logitech Z-5500s, the best upgrade you could do to your Z-906 looking at them is change the speaker cabling if you want to keep them. That change alone made a huge difference for me. Their are probably better and more sensible choices now too than the Chord Carnival Silverscreen I swapped into mine 10 years ago.

Are using Windows as your OS? If so, and you also have a CD/Vinyl or hi-res music collection, consider changing your Media player if you are using Creative's, or Itunes/Windows media player and start leveraging your soundcard's decent ASIO support. You should be able to make better use of your soundcards capabilities by using JRiver or Foobar 2000 for example.