A great audio setup for PC?

[Waco]

You're definitely going to need a preamp/receiver to control your gain and feed the amp the higher input voltage it needs. I've tried driving an amp directly from the fairly hot outputs on my home theater PC and it's just not enough.

[God Of Gaming]

I think I'll go with Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional sound card, and connect that subwoofer directly to it, and connect the 5-channel amplifier directly to the sound card as well, and connect the 4 bookshelf speakers and the center channel speaker to the amplifier. Is it going to work like that, or do I still need a preamp between the sound card and the amplifier? I'm asking since someone told me amplifiers need a lot of input voltage and sound cards don't output enough for that.

 

EDIT: Waco just said the same thing

Edited April 26, 2012 by God Of Gaming

[Stonerboy779]

He said it for good reason

Don't see why you need pointless digital effects I would ditch the soundcard unless you discover your onboard sound or hdmi audio is noisy.

The UMC-1 is your best option purely because it was practically made for the amp you want.

[Waco]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...but didn't Vista/7 do away with hardware accelerated audio completely due to the new sound stack? I was under the impression pretty much everything is done in software and you'll get the same sound effects regardless of how "nice" your sound card is.

[Stonerboy779]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...but didn't Vista/7 do away with hardware accelerated audio completely due to the new sound stack? I was under the impression pretty much everything is done in software and you'll get the same sound effects regardless of how "nice" your sound card is.

Maybe, I don't mess with my sound settings on the pc all I care about is being able to take audio out from my pc to my amp then speakers, play a blank track at full volume and have no noise. I can achieve this so I don't care

 

Any settings I do in regards to eq is all outside the pc and its really only to tone the sub down because floor boards reverberate nicely.

[Waco]

Same here to be honest. Nearly every game has software surround these days...

[God Of Gaming]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...but didn't Vista/7 do away with hardware accelerated audio completely due to the new sound stack? I was under the impression pretty much everything is done in software and you'll get the same sound effects regardless of how "nice" your sound card is.

What about XP? I use it way more than 7, and most of my favorite games are installed on it

[Stonerboy779]

What about XP? I use it way more than 7, and most of my favorite games are installed on it

How many games are there that only run on xp that have detailed 3D sound environments?

[God Of Gaming]

Too many to count, and my favorite ones are between them. Maybe some of them can run on 7 too, I haven't tried, I simply avoid compatibility problems by installing anything older than 2005 on XP and anything newer on 7

[Waco]

Too many to count, and my favorite ones are between them. Maybe some of them can run on 7 too, I haven't tried, I simply avoid compatibility problems by installing anything older than 2005 on XP and anything newer on 7

To be perfectly honest I've yet to run into a single game/program that worked on XP that won't work on Vista/7. Even older games from the Win95/98 era run well within XP mode or in a VMWare VM on 7.

[God Of Gaming]

Here's a few that I tried on Win7 and had problems with:

Need For Speed II SE (did not start)

Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed (did not start)

Half-Life (it started, but there was a bug in the console)

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (the game works, but the map editor does not)

Colin McRae Rally (did not start)

 

There probably are more games that do not work properly or not at all under 7, but after I had problems with these I got sick of it and dualbooted. BTW they might work with a virtual machine, but since this is essentially an emulator, I'd expect lower performance so I haven't tried. Besides, XP takes just about 20 GB more (together with updates, drivers and essential programs) which is the size of one modern game or ripped blu-ray movie, so it's not a problem.

Edited April 26, 2012 by God Of Gaming

[Waco]

I was actually fairly surprised by the hardware emulation in the newest VMWare player. I have an XP image I use and it'll run DX9 games flawlessly since it passes the drawing calls to your actual video card driver. It was fun seeing 999 FPS in 3DMark 99 Max and 3DMark 2001.

 

VMWare player is free and you don't have to reboot to play games...that was the kicker for me. I hated rebooting when I had my machine set up to dual boot.

 

 

I do wonder if the newest patches for the games you mentioned would help (though they are quite old, I would expect XP SP3 compatibility mode in 7 to make them at least start up).