But I'm wondering now after reading all this. I've got a SoundBlaster X-Fi extreme card that supports optical & appears to support all the Dolby Methods described in the preceding posts. Would I take a DX12 combo (X12 headset and the DSS unit) as a replacement? My initial response is "No", so I'm searching around for opinion. As they are under warranty, I returned to Lygo international in the UK (distributors for TB) & they say that the set has been discontinued and they are struggling to get in any stock to replace it with. Unfortunately, one of the speakers stopped working and the sound became very one sided.
I found it worked brilliantly & the sound quality was not too bad (I'm not an audiophile & my untrained ear thinks they're OK, they do the job of presenting 5.1 to my ears when I'm PC gaming and that's what I want them for). I have (had) the Turtle Beach Z6A headphones which actually takes in 5.1 input from my sound card & reproduces the sound with numerous speakers in each ear piece. I'm reading this with interest as I'm considering a Turtle Beach DX12 combo. More bass then my old(er) Sennheiser PC350's, but not overkill like some headsets. I'm using the 250Ohm version, but a 32Ohm version is avaliable for people who have a soundcard without a built in amp. Right now, I'm using a DT 770 as my primary headset. This is the exact reason why I hope HDMI eventually replaces Optical for these types of things, since you could just stream the uncompressed 5.1 audio stream. Well, technically the Turtle Beach headset will work fine for Dolby audio streams that already exist. Just wanted to come back and say thanks very much for explaining that mate, it makes prefect sense now, i will go with the card you recomended as its everywhere and i will just have to save up, alot of poeple say they feel the best sound is to get a decent sound card and normal headphones instead of the gaming headsets, whats your take on that, so rather than this virtual surround they say just get decent sound card and decent headphones I know the ASUS Xonar DS can do DTS encoding, so if you headset can accept DTS, you could go that route instead as the DS is a cheaper card. In either case, you need a soundcard, and the cheapest one with Dolby Digital Live support that I can find is the ASUS Xonar DX. Again, most soundcard offer this, but most onboard audio chipsets don't. You get a stereo signal, but the audio has been shifted to make it *sound* like it is true surround sound. They take a 5.1 audio stream, and adjust it so it fits onto a stereo output. The tech taht does this is called Dolby Digital Live, and *most* modern soundcards offer this, but few onboard audio chipsets do. Because uncompressed 5.1 audio can not fit over an optical connection, you have to encode to Dolby Digital. The first is ENCODING, or changing from one format to another.
Ok, there are two seperate techs we're talking about here. DVD movies and any other Dolby Digital-encoded audio data can be transmitted through the Riviera or Micro II to the DSS with no problems, even without DDL. We no longer offer a DDL-equipped sound card, but there are some available. Headphones connected to the DSS will then play the resulting Dolby Headphone surround sound. Once this has been accomplished, the Dolby Digital data can be sent from the sound card to the DSS.
The solution is to install a sound card that includes Dolby Digital Live ("DDL") processing, which encodes the multi-channel LPCM audio into a Dolby Digital bitstream. These soundtracks are just about always in the multi-channel Linear PCM ("LPCM") format, which cannot be transmitted over S/PDIF, either optical or coaxial. The situation is more complicated for surround sound playback in headphones from PC games.
Ok so after reading a bit on the turtlebeach website it says this, i was hoping someone who know what it all means could read it and then link me to what i need for it to work, id really appreciate it