Question About Sound Cards and Receivers

Hey guys,

I have an A8N-SLI motherboard with an AMD X2 4400+ (socket 939). The MB has optical and coaxial SP/DIF and the audio driver is the Realtek ALC850 (AC'97). I recently got a Denon receiver which decodes DD and DTS formats (but not the HD ones) and I would like to have my games encoded in REAL 5.1/7.1 surround sound DDL or DTS. I've been doing a lot of research on what has to be done in order to get TRUE 5.1/7.1 to go through my AV receiver because in gaming, the whole DD Pro Logic II/x or the DTS Neo:6 just isn't cutting it (I'm not a fan of Matrix decoding when playing a 2 channel source). I've read all of the pertinent posts regarding sound cards that have hardware DDL and DTS encoding on the fly. My question is, if I get one of these cards, will the cards be encoding DD/DTS 2 channel stereo to be sent to the receiver which will then use Matrix decoding for 5.1/7.1 surround sound? Or will it encode DDL or DTS in all 5.1/7.1 discreet channels for TRUE surround sound?

My post pertains to mostly gaming as I already have a good Denon DVD player that does real DD and DTS surround sound. Any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Thanks for the replies!

Well, I have no problem getting sound from any source to go to my AVR via coaxial or optical. But the AVR sees it as 2 channel and decodes it in Dolby Digital II or DTS Neo:6.

But I like what ferrisg is saying (if it's true ). So let's assume I get a sound card that can encode (on the fly) any 5.1 source (like a game) into Dolby Digital Live or DTS. As long as I point the audio to the driver of the new sound card and output it via SP/DIF to my receiver, I should be able to get full 5.1, right?



On a side note, I am pretty sure optical can output 7.1 channels......even Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD...........but not DTS HD Master audio (which has a variable bit-rate of 24.5 Mbps; you need HDMI 1.3 for that).

How do I know if my receiver has 5.1 analog inputs? I would have no problem doing that, but that's assuming my receiver can do that. My System is the Denon DHT487dv HTIB. Receiver alone is the Denon AVR-487.

Details here: http://usa.denon.com/DHT-487DVLit.pdf

Thanks.


EDIT: Nevermind. I found out my receiver has 6 ch Ext. in. So all I have to do is get the converter cables and connect my analog audio ports from my PC to the EXT In ports on the receiver? Why doesn't every one else do this? Is there some sort of quality loss when using analog?