Best soundcard for quality on 5.1 setup

[Eggshen]

I've been reading through threads related to this but everyone seems to care about headphones also, I don't.

I want the best card for a 5.1 system. It seems the cards that keep getting recommended are from 2008 and 2009?? Hasn't there been anything really good in the last few years that came out?

I have an Onkyo receiver and all speakers are Def techs.

The biggest concerns I have are in this order, sound quality for gaming, DTS interactive and Dolby Digital Live.

I currently have an Auzentech Prelude sound card that is great except for one annoying thing that has been happening ever since I bought this card. While gaming or watching video in full screen, the audio signal is randomly lost for a few seconds. I've read numerous threads about this that pretty much say it's the sound card drivers and there's nothing you can do about it. So I've finally had enough and want to buy a new card!

Price isn't really a concern, I just want the best there is.

 

[jamesriley94]

Not sure about sound cards really for that setup, but if price is no object, you'd probably be better off with external DACs and amps.
If not, your best option would probably be the xonar essence ST with the H6 for surround sound.

 

[Excalabur50]

As has been said the xonar ST or STX

 

[SuB]

I'd stick with the prelude and find some better drivers for it. I had that card for 5.1 and it's still one of the best.

The reason everything went to shit is because in windows Vista, Microsoft just dropped support for an entire way of software making sound which made a lot of the advancements pointless.

Things like the creative recon3d piece of crap are the result of this *going backwards*. the card is an absolute pile of rubbish from a quality/processing standpoint. But they've stuck a bit colourful heatsink and die cover on it to make it look fancy and they're selling it for crazy bucks.

The prelude always was a bit funny with dolby live and whatnot because they released it WITHOUT driver support because of licensing and a bunch of stuff I believe, but it's STILL one of the very best X-Fi cards you can buy if you want to put the processing of X-Fi, with the quality of Auzentech.

Personally I'd start looking for better driver packs, it's been a while since I used mine but I didn't have too many issues with this. I assume since you're using dolby digital live etc that you're outputting via optical/coax?

I'd suggest making sure your card is outputting at the correct sample rate (44khz for music, 48khz for games/dvd) and that your receiver can handle both of those and is setup to do so before you being watching your stuff, the stopping could be the signal switching around.

Alternatively, the standard analogue outputs via 5.1 or 7.1 are still superb and they will not have these drops in sound.