Onboard spdif vs sound card spdif

[amdsucksd00d]

I use my onboard spdif on my ASUS motherboard to connect to my ONKYO receiver. I was wondering if anyone knew if there would be a noticeable increase in sound quality if I upgraded to a high end audio card?

[Odanez]

I don't think so, since it is just digital out - the data being sent out should be the exact same.

[Scubar]

The only extra feature you will get from a seperate sound card with the SPDIF is that they normally have Dolby Digital Live on them which is pretty awesome. I dont think any onboard ones currently do this but I could be wrong.

[AruisDante]

In terms of raw signal output, not at all. That's the point of S/PDIF.

Any pre-processing done by the sound-card would be different of course. If you're just doing straight bit-streaming of DD/DTS, there would be no difference at all. The other thing is that some sound cards only support certain output types (non-bitstreamed) over S/PDIF. For example, X-Fi sound cards can only do stereo, which was always kind of a laughable constraint for a soundcard to have.

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Originally Posted by amdsucksd00d

I use my onboard spdif on my ASUS motherboard to connect to my ONKYO receiver. I was wondering if anyone knew if there would be a noticeable increase in sound quality if I upgraded to a high end audio card?

if you aren't picking up any noise from the motherboard's dirty dirty power, then no. if you are, then yes. i'm using a $200 asus xonar essence stx sound card strictly for digital coax spdif out. overkill? no. my motherboard doesn't have pci slots. it's the only pci express soundcard i could find with spdif output with clean power and it's own filtering (straight from the power supply via molex)

if you're happy with the sound, then there's no point in spending more money. if you can hear noise and it bothers you, then you should definitely get a card. (but make sure it has good filtering / power else it'll just pick up noise from the motherboard anyways)