new sound card or not?

[admin_exported]

im after a new sound card with a good optical out.im going to stream to a dac and to my amp.do i need a good sound card with optical out .or amy sound card with optical out as its going to a dac any way?any advice thx

 

[SpiceWeasel]

If it was my money I would go for a cheap card, no point paying for all the bells and whistles if you are using a seperate dac. By using the optical out from the sound card it will by bypass the cards gubbins anyway. If your motherboard has a built in optical out then you can use that instead of a seperate sound card (if it has a built in sound card), you might need to enable this in the bios though.

I have a Creative X-Fi sound card in my pc although that is used soley for gaming now. I use a Firestone Audio Fubar4 connected via usb for listening to music via the built in headphone amp (Grado SR80i). The sound quality via the Firestones dac is miles better than the one in my soundcard, I havn't tried using the optical out though.

 

[Anonymous]

If ur not bothered about playing blu-rays and DTS-HD MA (u'd need an hdmi connection for that) - and just want a good soundcard with a digital optical out then the Creative Soundblaster Audigy SE is a decent bet with 7.1 sound for around the £20-25 mark.

If your going to using an optical out to an amp its hard to do better for the money.

 

[Alec]

SpiceWeasel:If it was my money I would go for a cheap card, no point paying for all the bells and whistles if you are using a seperate dac. By using the optical out from the sound card it will by bypass the cards gubbins anyway.

I think this would be my feeling too.