For anyone who understands sound cards

[A Nerd]

I put in a sound card some time back and have been tinkering with the settings to optimize the sound (the manual is garbage) and I had a question about this particular setting:



What I have it on now sounds better than when it is off, but I have no idea what DTS connect is. I turned it on and it only made the speakers softer. The settings for this feature are beyond me. Anyone familiar with a Creative SB X-Fi?

[Lemur]

Not familiar with that specific card, but DTS is its own world, having largely to do with mimicking theater surround sound. Never had much use for it meself. And if you're not playing a Blu-Ray through a 7.1 speaker system, I have no idea why it would be of use.

[A Nerd]

I set up 7.1 and listen to internet radio and play CDs on Windows Media Player. I haven't tried a DVD yet.

Interesting write up, though a tad confusing. I guess I will tinker with it and hope for more opinions! :)

edit: It would seem that when I choose DTS and set the speakers to 7.1 only 2.1 works. :/ I can't really figure out why. Dolby sounds good though. Seems to have fixed that crackling left front speaker as well! :D

[Tellos Athenaios]

DTS is simply an audio format, a way of converting the analog signal into a digital one similar to Dolby Digital. It's a matter of sampling and converting the many distinct analog signals (one for each speaker) into a single digital output signal. Additionally some audio movie players can play DTS files (i.e. pass it on to the sound card) themselves again, much like the Dolby Digital format; some movies supply additional DTS tracks along Dolby ones.

Now as it happens, with the Creative card when you instruct it to convert all analog signals into a DTS stream the Windows PCM volume control (i.e. the trusty loudspeaker icon thing) is bypassed entirely. So if that wasn't set to maximum you would notice a drop in audio volume once you disabled DTS connect and the volume control is applied again.

One of the reasons to use DTS connect is because of the fact you use a Creative card. And Creative cards don't always play well with speakers (say the Logitech Z5500) when you connect them through Optical out. But the nice thing about DTS is that such speaker sets tend to understand that format natively which means you can use it to work around this problem.

Regarding upmixing: this is a matter of price points. Creative being Creative, they decided to disable this feature for some sound cards but not on the more expensive cards, of course. Possibly they sell software upgrades for the DTS connect (which as you might have noticed is a standalone product bundled with the rest of the Creative software) to get it, I do not know.

[A Nerd]

Thanks for the info. As I experiment further with this card, can you tell me the difference between speakers and SPDIF Out? I have no idea what SPDIF Out is. Would this influence DTS?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well that would refer to the optical or coax out of either back of the card or the front bay. But if you have the encoder turned on then it is locked to the encoder software. The idea here is that the analog signals are routed through the encoder software to the SPDIF out. However, if you set the SPDIF to be the default output while you keep the encoder software enabled/running your sound will not work because the side effect of this scheme is that the SPDIF out is effectively closed to all audio that does not come from the encoder software.

Oh and another reason why upmixing could be disabled: looks like the DTS connect software only supports low end 48Khz samples. So depending on sample rates that feature may also be disabled. (But if the choice is between 24bit @ 48Khz 2.1 sound versus 16bit @ 48Khz fake 5.1, my immediate reaction is to go with stereo).