Digital vs analog sound

[predatowned]

I have a sound blaster audigy 2 ZS, and a pair of logitech - z680 5.1 digital speakers. When i bought my audigy 2, i didn't get the platinum version, which comes with the drive bay with optical connections.

Creative.com sales the drive bay separately. Is it worth getting? Is there a really big difference between digital, and analog sound? how much of a difference will I be hearing in movies, ect...?

http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=13&subcategory=55&product=11024

 

[[w0f]Oblivion]

Analog>Digital
Thats about as far as i know.

 

[dream431ca]

OK..Lesson in Analog and Digital....

Analog means all the information is sent at once to wherever it has to go..for example: A lightbulb. All the energy is going to the lightbulb and nothing intercepts it; so we can't do anything with the energy.

Digital is like analog but you can intercept the signal and change it. It's like saving the energy and changing it. For instance..the lightbulb can be blinked if a digital circuit is attached to the energy path. That's all it is.

In terms of sound quality..digital can give you amazing amount of options, your soundcard is digital because you can change the properties of the sound, like make it distort, change the base, treble and other things. In an analog system, you can't do those things.

What you are talking about is the optical sound for the speakers I think. In theory..Optical sound should sound better because, it's light. It's like fiber optics. There is no wire that it has to travel through so there is less resistance and in theory better sound quality.

It's up to you to pick which one..but the Digital one will cost a lot more.

OR if your fed up with everything get this: (you need realplayer or a realplayer plug in to see it.)

http://www.airfarce.com/video/050114jh.ram

 

[predatowned]

Thanks for the info. So digital doesn't have that much of a difference in sound quality? I was either going to get that drive bay, or some new ram. So i'm kind of stumped on which to get.

 

[DrDevin]

There is no difference in sound quality when you compare analog and digital especially on a PC. Digital sound is carried via an analog cable, S/PDIF, or a fibre optic cable.

PC speakers are usually analog (90% of the time) so games ouput sound over an analog connection (3 cables). Moving to digital you need to be able to encode the analog sound into a digital stream (usually dolby 5.1). Movies are digital 5.1 (dolby/dts) so in order to be played over PC speakers they need to decode the digital syteam into an analog one.

So if you move to a digital connection you will get slightly better sound from your movies, due to the DACs that convert the digital to analog (especially if you do not have a decoder that does not support surround sound you will get 5.1 instead of 2 channel).

However you will not get surround sound from games (just 2 channel) because games are not encoded in digital. You need a card that can encode dolby in realtime, such as intels HD integrated audio, NVIDIA's soundstorm or another card with the capability.

So unless you connect both analog and digital you would be better with just analog, digital wont sound better or help, unless you get an encoder soundcard.

Also what are the rest of your PC specs so i can see if you need more ram.

 

[holydeadpenguins]

Digital has much less noise.

 

[jonbob]

OK..Lesson in Analog and Digital....

Analog means all the information is sent at once to wherever it has to go..for example: A lightbulb. All the energy is going to the lightbulb and nothing intercepts it; so we can't do anything with the energy.

Digital is like analog but you can intercept the signal and change it. It's like saving the energy and changing it. For instance..the lightbulb can be blinked if a digital circuit is attached to the energy path. That's all it is.

I'm not sure what you were referring to, dream431ca, but analogue sound is basically transmitted as a varying voltage and that's why it's called analogue. I can distort or manipulate it however I want with the right equipment - a guitar wah-wah pedal being a cheap example.

Sound in this form is generally no good to a computer, it has to go through an ADC first. It is, however the only thing that speakers can work with.

Digital representations of sound take the form of a continuous stream of discrete values (ie high voltage or low voltage, 0 or 1). Signals in this form are easier to mess with using a computer, but useless to most everything else, hence the need for a good DAC.

In summary, one can easily tinker with an analogue signal. Digital sound is thus called because it takes the form of a series of binary digits, and has nothing to do with the quality of the sound itself.

In terms of sound quality..digital can give you amazing amount of options, your soundcard is digital because you can change the properties of the sound, like make it distort, change the base, treble and other things. In an analog system, you can't do those things.

See above, the soundcard uses digital signals natively because that's all it can understand. Another reason being the fact that you can manipulate the sound in any way you want using a general purpose processor when the signal is digital but you need bespoke hardware for an analogue one.

What you are talking about is the optical sound for the speakers I think. In theory..Optical sound should sound better because, it's light. It's like fiber optics. There is no wire that it has to travel through so there is less resistance and in theory better sound quality.

Bunk. Two identical waveforms transmitted over Toslink cable or Digital Coax will sound the same. With cable, the other end only needs to tell the difference between high and low: if the cable is so bad that this doesn't happen right you must be using string dipped in solder. On the other hand, cheap convertors can easily mess up an optical signal.

It doesn't matter if digital sound goes over cable or fibre (point in fact, cable is probably better unless you have expensive kit). The main thing is keeping the sound digital for as long as possible, unless it was analogue to start with as in say, an LP player, in which case converting it to digital and back will hurt the quality more than using analogue exclusively would.

It's up to you to pick which one..but the Digital one will cost a lot more.

Not really, my soundblaster was cheap as chips and it does digital no problem.

If the DAC in the speakers isn't as good as the one in the soundcard (which is probably the case here) then it may be wiser to make the change to analogue there; the short length of time the signal takes to travel the cable to the speakers shouldn't affect quality in any appreciable way.

However you will not get surround sound from games (just 2 channel) because games are not encoded in digital.
You need a card that can encode dolby in realtime, such as intels HD integrated audio, NVIDIA's soundstorm or another card with the capability.

Yup, spot on. If you want to get a board that does digital encoding natively, avoid Sound Blaster like the bloody plauge, the brands mentioned above are much superior, or even Hercules if you can afford it.

But to answer your question, you won't hear any difference. You may well already have a digital output; I think on some creative boards the orange speaker outout doubles as a digital coax output as well as a normal analogue one. See if your speakers will accept this input.

In summary there's no point in buying that drive bay thing, the sound coming out of your speakers is probably as good as it's going to get now.

 

[predatowned]

my pc speakers support DTS decoding... if that helps.

specs:

ASUS p4p800SE
P4 3.0E Prescott
corsair XMS pc 3200 (1GB)
Geforce 6800GT
sound blaster Audigy 2 ZS (getting the drive bay for optical connections)
Logitech Z680's 5.1 speakers (500 watt)

 

[jonbob]

Don't through your money away on the drive bay.

Check the back of the card for an orange connector. If there's one then you just need to be a digital coaxial cable. Your speakers will accept that. As for getting surround sound in games, I'm not sure - you may need to use the analogue outputs for that, but you will get 5.1 DTS sound out from the card when you play a DVD with it.

 

[DreamThrall]

Honestly, if you aren't using your computer for pro audio recording, and you aren't using 15 bagillion dollar digital professional speakers, you won't be able to tell the difference.

 

[jonbob]

Besides, if he were, he wouldn't need to ask. And he sure as hell wouldn't be using Creative gear.

Seriously, how do they get off on their 24bit claims when the cards input a 24bit signal, downsample to 16bit before doing anything with it, then upsample it before output. This is nothing compared to their rediculous SNR claims.