Well I've no money at the moment but soon... real soon I will have some.

I was checking soundcards, comparing them, even buying cheap fuckers and returning them to the shop.

I've discovered that most 5.1 or 7.1 surround cards are crap. you either need a speaker configuration matching the coloured outputs or if you are luck you will have an optical digital out. Which in my case was only stereo.

It seems those cards need some kind of AC35.1/DTS decoder through the SPDIF
Those cards turn pretty pricy. I found a few with Coaxial out around 70-80 bucks.
Asus has a slick one, but also coaxial only.

If anyone knows of a card between 80-140 bucks with REAL 5.1 or 7.1 (preferably 7.1) optical digital out I will blow him dry.

Oh and if the above is me talking from my ass. Correct me please. I know shit about soundcards nowadays

Well I found a brand that is not so expensive and explains how it has DTS through the SPDIF where other manufactures dont mention anything of that.

http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/x-plosion.php

I am not very uptodate with this stuff, but when I built my HTPC 2-3 years ago I bought this decoder. It's good and was not too expensive:

http://us.creative.com/products/product ... oduct=9468

Well I own a Denon receiver which I think does the same job as that box. (it doesn't look as slick as that box though)

All I need is my PC to shoot out AC3/DTS digitally.

That box needs a soundcard as well

According to this schematic it's the same principal as most soundcards. The colored outputs shoot into the box and from there to the speakers

I'm using a 'regular' onboard soundcard with a 'coaxial' SPDIF output. I connect that output to one of the coaxial inputs of the decoder. Then AC3 or DTS audio is sent 'digitally' to the decoder.

The tricky part are for example movies with 5.1 AAC sound. On my HTPC I'm using FFDShow Audio Decoder. You can configure it to output anything as AC3. So if you watch a movie with 5.1 AAC sound, FFDShow Audio Decoder re-encodes it on the fly as AC3 so the decoder understands the 5.1 channels.

So: DTS goes as DTS, AC3 as AC3, anything else via FFDShow Audio Decoder goes as AC3.

I think games are a different story. Dunno how the decoder works with games.