Music on PC

Well, TH ebest card fro music playback right now is the Auzen X-Meridian. With second place being held by the X-fi. If you want good sound quality with a analog speaker system there is really only one choice, X-Meridian.

If you just want the best digital stereo out you can use ASIO capable USB soundcards (there are a couple but I don't recall their names) and that will give you bit perfect output in the digital domain at a very low cost. I think under $50... Someone else will have to give the names of them.

You do want to bypass windows mixer one way or another or no level of money will get you anywhere near ideal in the analog domain.

Troy

An inexpensive pci card that will give you a bit-perfect output is the Chaintech AV-710. Spend a bit more and you can get a M-Audio card.

Like pcCinema said, you really have to bypass the Windows mixer and the resampling that some (most?) soundcards do. If you don't get this right you will not have really great sound out of your PC, no matter how much you spend on the speakers.

cheers for the mid-priced Xp-Meridian, but I've yet to hear that it actually is better than the Lynx 2b.... I opted for the X-Fi because it's the only game in town for external DD/DTS decode....

If all I'm doing is outputting SPDIF to an external prepro, is the onboard SoundMax on my ASUS motherboard sufficient for bit perfect playback?

I don't think so but when in doubt, test it. You need to install an ASIO driver (like Asio4all) and to use a player that supports ASIO (foobar2000, Winamp with a plugin, J River Mediacenter). Play a DTS wave file and when your processor locks to it, you have bit-perfect.

Depending on your budget I would also recommend the Echo Gina 3G soundcard, especially if you're going with the analog outputs. I have both and Gina 3G is in a different league (haven't tried digital out on either one).

Windows has always messed up audio quality because of how kmixer works. If you want the background just do a quick search on kmixer and ASIO anywhere, here or google. You would think that it would put out whatever digital bit's it's decoding by default but then you'd be wrong. Same applies to analog.

If you're really into sound quality, as it seems you are, you will want to do it right and bypass kmixer and use lossless audio etc not mp3 no matter how high the bitrate is.

Troy

The X-FI Elite Pro that I use has a wonderfully "perfect" (as in -136+db artifacts) Sample Rate Converter (SRC) that bypasses kMixer's terrible SRC and alleviates such issues in the analog domain quite nicely

Rather than a PCI soundcard, if you really want the best music, you might want to look at the Slim Devices Squeezebox.

It uses the PC as a server/storage only (flac files, or mp3's if desired) and connects through a wired or wireless network. It has it's own Burr-Brown 24-bit DAC and outputs to a receivers analog inputs, or I imagine to the powered speakers you are planning on, as it has a volume control. You can control it via a custom web interface, the supplied remote control (so you don't have to turn on the TV/monitor to listen to music) or even with a PDA through a wireless network. I got one a couple months ago and, as you can probably tell, love it. Costs $250 - $300 though. They have a $2K audiophile model too.

I'm not positive about it working with the powered speakers and you would still need a sound card for home theater, but this would give you great music.