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Hi,

does anyone have any recommendations or otherwise for a low cost external soundcard which I can use to output 5.1 from my XP laptop to my home cinema system?

TIA,
H.

I have been burning Plogued and encoded tunes to DVDs to listen to in my car. I recently posted questions about clipping and based on the answers received lead me to believe that if I want to improve my conversions I will need to listen to them more carefully before finalizing.

Currently, I use the SPDIF connection and a 5.1 speaker setup left over from an old computer. The speakers cannot be connected individually to the six audio outputs I have on my motherboard.

Would you please recommend a setup/package that would allow me to better monitor my Plogue conversions?

I still use a Creative Audigy 2ZS Notebook PCMCIA card which I originally bought for a laptop. I has six spam outputs, so it allows Plogue monitoring. It also has an optical out if you need it. The card is connected directly into an HT receiver. I've always liked the sound of this card. I use it on a Windows XP system and I'm not sure what the driver status would be for Win7 or Vista. You may be able to find this card on eBay.

I use a USB soundcard, Gigaport HD. It has 8 spam outs. I used to use it direct to my HT's 6 ch. spam ins, and that meant that I also needed to do "bass management" in Plogue, so I made a little group with an EQ, bass management VST and the Audio device that I used for live monitoring.

I have since acquired a discontinued box from from creative, that does spam to DTS encoding on the fly. By feeding that with the audio from the Gigaport HD, I can now connect to my HT via SPDIF, and have the same bass management and other settings that get by-passed when using the HT spam ins. I definitely hear any "cliping" as a kind of clicking sound now.

You can still get this hardware dts boxes on ebay. I managed to get one that was new in a box.









Another nice feature of the creative box is it has SPDIF ins as well as outs (both optical and coax from memory) so it doesn't use up another SPDIF input on your HT. Take an existing SPDIF source, say a DVD player, run it the Creative SPDIF in, the the Creative SPDIF out to the input on your HT. But the Creative in "bypass" to watch DVD's, and "active" to live monitor from Plogue or playback DTS waves/flacs from Foobar, VLC, etc.

Thanks for the advice on soundcards - I plan to use the Gigaport HD along with the Creative DTS610.

I do not have a 5.1 HT system that I can monitor my surrounds with - would you please recommend a system or suggest minimum requirements? I see Logitech (G51, X540, Z5500) and others advertised but am a bit confused on what I need

Thanks in advance.

I bought my HT (I monitor with) at the swap meet for 35 bucks a bit of a crap shoot but it worked out well! I had nice speakers left over from my very first HT setup that I re-used.

You can certainly spend whatever you want on HT receivers and speakers so knowing an approximate budget might help us recommend something.

The idea of using the creative dts-610 is so your live monitor setup (dts decoding, bass management, time delay EQ) would be exactly the same as when you playback your finished product, but the other way to go take the output of the Gigaport HD and take it straight into 6 ch amp or powered speaker setup.

River 161's example are powered full range speakers. Before I had the dts-610 I was going into my $35 dollar HT with the 6 spam inputs and that was driving my 5.1 speaker setup. Note that in 99% of HTs, if you go spam in you are bypassing ALL processing, including bass management, so if you don't have full range speakers and/or you have a subwoofer, you need to use a Bass management VST in Plogue as part of your live monitoring setup.

There's a free VST that does that, and you could add time delay, an EQ, the Gigaport HD audio device, and make it all an "HT" group.

very good thread.
here where i live is hard to find some labels/models and to import the taxes are high.

what i found around is this external Zalman external audiocard, i don't know nobody that have this card to ask details about quality... is recommendable?