Surround 5.1 as 3 stereo outputs?

[TiUser]

Hi Folks.

My new PC has a 5.1 sound card and I asked myself in which ways I can use this with cantabile.

Do I need a x-over plugin to use a subwoofer?

Can I use the rear stereo channels as stereo monitor channels?

In general can I use the front left/right, subwofer/center and rear left/right output jacks as 3 ordinary stereo channels? Or is there something special in the audio driver about surround?

[Sasu Honka]

Hi TiUser!

Depending on the brand of the card there can be some features in the original drivers. As long as you are using ASIO drivers, there should be nothing preventing you from using outputs as 3 stereo pairs.

The sound quality can vary depending on the physical outputs: old Creative cards had for example better DA converters on the REAR channels! You might want to test the quality of the outputs monitoring with decent pair of headphones or studio monitors.

If you are using 5.1system you should probably use the vendors drivers, otherwise you should drive the sub-out through lo-pass filter. Consumer 5.1 systems usually require sub-channel to be pre-filtered.

Sasu

[TiUser]

Hi

Thanks for your answer.

I'm just about rearranging my music corner with some some older gear I already have... for instance JBL Control 1 monitors which I didn't use for quite some time...

It's onboard sound "Realtek ALC888/S/T @ nVIDIA MCP73 - High Definition Audio Controller" and I'm quite amazed what it can do. Guess it's nothing close to high end but pretty usable and supports 24bit and higher sampling rates too. Only the input looks worse on paper, 16bit only... but hey, for onboard it's still not bad...

I have to investigate now... and need some more of these tiny 3.5 plugs... From my old days I've just these heavy Neutric stuff laying around and it's hard to squeeze these in tiny PC connectors...

Anyway, guess that's what I will use until I get my Virus TI working. I'm still busy with Vista64 and didn't tune up my second XP32 OS install for that...

[Sasu Honka]

asio4all should work perfectly with onboard chips. I can run my laptop with 128sample buffer with couple VSTi and effects with ease.

Just remember to turn off your wireless lan when using small buffers. Otherwise you get random crackles!

Sasu

[TiUser]

Yup, I'm using Asio4All in Vista 64 and it seems to work fine.

I don't use wireless networking, so no issue here...

I can run a lot of plugins on the quadcore, the only thing that confuses me is the comparably high timing load Cantabile shows. While CPU is hardly hitting 50% timing load easily goes up to 80% or more when using smaller buffer sizes than I currently do (192 samples)

Anyway, my new machine is pretty capable, at least when apps use all cores...

I've checked out Cakewalk Project 5 which seems just to use one core... that's not as great...

[TiUser]

I've checked out Cakewalk Project 5 which seems just to use one core... that's not as great...

I'ts even worse with this... Just got a mail from Cakewalk lately that Project 5 is discontinued - and they offer special priced crossgrade to sonar...