Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?

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musiclear

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Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?
« on: 21 Dec 2014, 07:55 pm »
I didn't expect this .......

I thought I would upgrade from my mother board SPDIF to a high end Asus Essence ST sound card into my Berhinger DCX 2496.

When I did, it sounded worse.

The system lost depth, and picked up a hard edge and sounded rather lifeless.

I thought, well maybe the sound card needs to be "broken in" and I left it for several hours, and honestly it is pretty hard to listen too compared to the smooth open sound I was used to.

I took out the Asus, reinstalled the mother board SPDIF drivers and I am back to smooth, deep and just nice to listen to.

What do you think could be going on?  I thought the Asus was supposed to be a pretty nice set up. 

The end game was to use the Asus Essence 7.1 sound card and "Frequency Allocator" for active crossover and EQ from the sound card directly into my amps.

Now I am questioning how that might sound with the lack of quality from the SPDIF output in the Asus card.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Speedskater

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Re: Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?
« Reply #1 on: 22 Dec 2014, 05:34 pm »
They don't need burn-in but installing the card may have changed some of your computer's audio settings.  Some time back Benchmark & Stereophile discovered that Windows updates would overwrite the PC's custom audio settings.

Bob2

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Re: Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?
« Reply #2 on: 22 Dec 2014, 07:19 pm »
Did you make any adjustments in the Essence audio center?
Mine sounded less than good till I made some changes.

mojave

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Re: Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?
« Reply #3 on: 22 Dec 2014, 07:36 pm »
I have the Essence ST and have owned the DCX2496. I used SPDIF input into the DCX2496 at the time. Were you sending 48 kHz via SPDIF from the motherboard and 96 kHz output from the Essence ST? The DCX2496 doesn't always work properly with 96 kHz via SPDIF.

Are you using ASIO, WASAPI, or Direct Sound output to the Essence ST? Only ASIO bypasses Windows completely with the ASUS cards. I also recommend using the UNI Xonar drivers vs the standard ASUS drivers.

Quote
The end game was to use the Asus Essence 7.1 sound card and "Frequency Allocator" for active crossover and EQ from the sound card directly into my amps.
If this is what you want to do, then SPDIF isn't really relevant since it is only two channel. The Essence has better analog outs than the DCX2496. I recommend you get the H6 daughter card and output directly to your amps. Also, the DSP in the Essence driver's is terrible. Use a good 64-bit DSP like JRiver Media Center for active crossovers.

musiclear

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Re: Sound card SPDIF worse than mother board?
« Reply #4 on: 24 Dec 2014, 04:11 am »
Some great suggestions.

I may have used 96khz from the Essence into the DCX.  I'll give that one a look see and re listen.

Frequency Allocator program was to reroute the outputs of the sound card to run a fully active three way with sub out.

Allocator was also to program the dsp within the Essence sound card and take advantage of the high quality AD converters with the Essence card.

Since then, I've been looking into the Hypex plate amps with DSP built in.  The plate amps have two channel amps with programing for three channel and an RCA out to feed signal to the last amp channel if needed.

From what I understand, they are supposed to sound really good.

If I go this route, I will be able to run SPDIF to each speaker, do all DSP programing on speaker and mount the amps within the cabinet.

Bamberg did this with their Series 3 and I think it came out really well.