Sound card advice needed

[ianm0]

I am looking for a PCI-E sound card for good quality 2-channel stereo with:
1. Coaxial SPDIF output - I will be using an external DAC
2. No upsampling of input signals at digital out - (AC97 upsamples 44.1 khz to 48 khz - not my cup of tea) & preferably what comes in is what goes out.
3. 24 bit, 96khz & upwards

Won't be used for surround sound or gaming. Recommendations appreciated.

[heartofhate]

have you looked at the creative sound blaster X-Fi titanium yet? imo it is a good card war a low price. it should have every recommandation you want.
i do not know where you live but here in germany you can get this one for only 60€

[ianm0]

The Titanium does not seem to have a coaxial SPDIF digital output - only optical. Stand to be corrected.

[Audiophile]

I am using emu 1212. Sounds great and has everything you are looking for:
http://us.store.creative.com/EMU-1212M- ... VDMUQ6.htm

[graziellan]

no good experience with the Titanium here, win7 does not recognize the card

[ianm0]

I am using emu 1212.

Thanks for the link. I then noticed Creative has a cheaper version E-mu 1010 too. I wonder if most of the extra cost goes into a better digital to analog converter.

Actually what I am looking for is much less than these cards offer: a simple bit transparent card. Let me elaborate:

1. A player like MediaMonkey or Foobar2000 reads an audio file (say, in FLAC format), then
2.Bypassing Win7's kernel mixer, outputs (via coaxial SPDIF) the signal to an external DAC faithfully, i.e. without resampling (e.g. I try to avoid AC97, which resamples everything to 48 khz.)

So I am looking for a card doing the above, the quality of the DAC I couldn't care less for since I already have a decent DAC. Does such a card exist?

[Audiophile]

Thanks for the link. I then noticed Creative has a cheaper version E-mu 1010 too. I wonder if most of the extra cost goes into a better digital to analog converter.

Actually what I am looking for is much less than these cards offer: a simple bit transparent card.

In general you can use any sound card that has a coaxial SPDIF and install asio as driver. But I think, simple (and cheaper) cards don' t support hires audio.
Another possible solution would be a USB to SPDIF converter like:
- http://www.musicalfidelity.com/products ... v-link.asp
or
- http://www.m2tech.biz/hiface.html

These interfaces are a bit more expensive but offer superb sound quality.

And if you are using a good dac I would recommend to try different players. I experienced e.g. that winamp (with same input and output plugins) sounds much better than mediamonkey and even foobar (actually I am using MM only to organise my music and winamp for playback). Although I am not sure if it is allowed to make such a statement in this forum.

[JwlzMT]

Recommended brands:
Asus Xonar
Ht Omega

...in that order.