Audigy VS SB Live 5.1 for gaming in surround

Where is your DTS coming from? The SB Live 5.1 only decodes DD. Does the hoontech decode DTS?

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Not possible, even w/ Audigy. Either you have use analog ouput to get 4 channel or.. set SBLive to 2 channel mode and turn Dolby prologic on from your AV receiver to get the similar 4 channel sound. Does any game have 4 descrete channel sound? I don't think so..

I believe that the sblive does stereo front and back.


I know that because of the cambridge soundworks speaker setup that I have on my other PC. It has front and rear outs from the card, so I believe that the output is 2 2-channel streams.


I'll try to do an analogue hookup tonight and post the results.

Actually there are plenty of games with 4 channel discrete sounds, or even 5.1. They only work via the 3 stereo outs on the SB Live though, not the digital out.


Games like Need for Speed High Stakes use all of the surround channels and it sounds great. You can listen to cars getting close to you from behind on either side. It's really a great driving game. I assume there's gotta be flight simulators that offer the same experience.


Also, the EAX effects on the card affect how sound comes out, and I'm sure they take all speakers into consideration.


JoseQ

4 or 5.1 games are not encoded in a DIGITAL format ,they are EAX games and these channels can only be heard through ANALOG connection not a digital one.Although with my DTT 3500 DIGITAL speakers , i can hear all these channels with one connection called ( DIGITAL DIN).

I have a SBLive! connected by coax S/PDIF (no analog connection) to my receiver. When playing an EAX enabled game (e.g. Everquest) with the speaker selection set to Live!Surround, I get a Dolby Surround signal at the receiver that works great. I also get surround with any non DD/DTS source if I turn on EAX effects.

I'm curious how EAX or other gaming surround sound compares to running a digital coax SPDIF and letting your recevier do the surround sound DSP or whatever...

I think what you want is 5.1 Dolby Digital sound in your games.

The only way to get that is by using a Nvidia nForce motherboard. It has the necessary DSP's to give you 3d-sound for 6 channels + output it digitally as 6 channels as Dolby Digital.

I think I can answer this one. In order to get 5.1 the sound card needs to send Dolby Digital (or DTS). This works when the source is a DVD with a DD or DTS soundtrack and the card is in passthrough mode. If the source is a game, the 4 or 5.1 channel audio would need to be encoded in DD or DTS before being sent out the digital output. As far as I know, no sound card (or driver for a sound card) can do this. According to Creative, even if this could be done, the latency (delay) added in the encode process would make the sound lag the picture by too much. Thus, you are limited to two channel (or pseudo surround via Prologic) on the digital out. If you card has analog outputs for each channel, you can use those.


It is an interesting problem for those with digital speaker systems, there is no possibility for true 4 channel or 5.1 channel surround gaiming for them.


-Charles

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Both SB Live 5.1 and Audigy have separate Front, Rear, and Center/Sub digital outputs for use with digital-input speaker systems like the one about to be introduced by Cambridge SoundWorks. These can be used for 4 channel gaming, or DD using the SB card's software decoding. I don't know of any receivers or processors with 6 channel discrete digital inputs, the best set-up for gaming is be to use the analog output into the receiver/processor's 6-channel discrete input and the Hoontech digital output (Or the one on a Live Drive) into the digital in on the receiver for DD/DTS pass through.


Bob Hazelwood

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If I remember correctly, the DD encode latency for the nForce is around 70msec. That is roughly the latency of MIDI, and shouldn't be detectable to all but the most sensitive people in the most sensitive applications.