sound card with more than 7.1ch?

so ive been experimenting with my speakers and, what ive found is that my surround sound setup is missing an up and down indication. ive tried to look and see if there were any 9.2 channel sound cards, but i have found none so far. does anyone else know of a sound card with more than 7.1 channels, or if there is a way to use two sound cards together?

 

Why go more than 5 speakers? My Asus Xonar D2X is great with 4 speakers + a Velodyne VX-11 low power digital subwoofer. Awesome for MP3 music!

 

im bored with my setup, and while gaming id like to know exactly where the sound is coming from.

 

Problem is most games (100%?) do not output more than 5 channels, and to achieve up & down, it has to be designed in the game in the first place, otherwise those extra channels will be useless - they will either duplicate other channels or emulate their perspective positional channels via third-party software.

 

well that sucks, im pretty disapointed, with all the time and energy spent making these games like bf3 and if they could just spend a little time improving the sound, it would make a world of difference.

 

i'm curious--what source of yours do you think has an encoded "up and down indication"? these articles ( 1, 2, & 3) might be of interest to you.

 

honestly it wouldn't be that difficult to make a better sound system with an up and down indication.

Here is how it would work:

-you would need to have the position of your speakers programmed into the card. it would essentially make a sphere with the regions for each speaker, the more speakers the higher the "resolution"
(if you have only 4 speakers you could arrange them in a tetrahedral pattern(two in front horizontally, two behind oriented vertically)

-each sound sample coming from the source is assigned variables, basically x,y,z, relative to the listener. other variables too like directionality, and even a polar graph of the sound intensity could be encoded.

-the sound card then uses its hardware to calculate which speakers to output the sounds to and how loud.

by using this system it doesnt matter how many speakers you have, you will just get discrete sound from them no matter what the input source is, even music could be processed like this very easily.

so basically instead of having 8 seperate channels for sound, you have x number of channels, and samples of sounds from the source are encoded with positional data to tell the sound card where to output the sound to.

because after all does a sound card actually do nowadays?

also this one has 5x rca outs so 10 channels... i guess, or 9.1 http://www.asus.com/ROG/ROG_Xonar_Phoebus/

 

Unfortunately it's 7.1ch + what I'm guessing they are calling the "Analog Out" is the impedance switching headphone jack.

5 x 3.5 mm jack (1/8") (Analog out/Front out/Side out/Center-Subwoofer out/Rear out)

First we would need an affordable 9.1 decoder for a consumer level sound card. There really is no reason right now as there is no source material or large adoption of 9.1. It'll probably happen eventually. I'm happy with my plantronics gamescom 780 simulated 7.1 headphones.

 

You can get up & down placement with a games 3d sound engine and a good pair of 2.0 headphones.

Add a tactical transducer like I am to my setup right now and you can "feel" the boom just like you would with big speakers but still use your headphones.

 

i know that you can use turtle beaches, and even though they only have the two speakers they can emulate things coming from in front or behind, but in my opinion when you try to emulate sounds like that, the quality of the sound is just so crappy, it definitely works because people keep buying their products, including all of those people that do mlg and lan parties, but you are just never going to get the quality of speaker system with individual speakers.

 

You can make anything sound easy if you take such a simplistic approach to it. If it were easy and worthwhile it would have already been released, don't you think?

 

it is actually easy, its just not necessarily profitable and that's why it doesn't exist, because people would have to want to have a new more expensive sound system and be willing to purchase new equipment, and as of right now even on this gaming forum people are happy with what they have, so unless someone just does it and has extra money to do it, it will not be done. its sort of like 3d, and physx. while they are at this point available, they are not mainstream and they are not optimized or cheap.

 

Exactly why I said if it were easy AND worthwhile. While our opinion may differ on whether or not it's "easy", it's definitely not worthwhile, in terms of processing overhead and development costs.

 

i wonder how games today distribute the different sounds to the speakers?

 

Dollar for dollar good headphones destroy speakers in SQ, you just need to hear some good headphones and on a good DAC. Your more than 7.1 idea is not going to work no game is made to distribute more than 7.1 channels, most are not even made to do 7.1 and only 5.1 at the most.

You have 2 ears, 2 speakers worth is all you can hear, with a proper 3d sound engine you can not tell the difference between 2 speakers and 20.

If positioning is your key focus headphones are the solution, and not one of those gimmick 5.1 or 7.1 headsets, its just marketing fluff.

 

Here's what: you will achieve more happiness in life if you're content with simpler things. Like cheaper good fast food than a luxury restaurant. 5.1 surround is good enough, you don't need 7.1 or 9.1, - that's way extravagant. And I wasn't aware if many games even program for surround sound. I'm often happy with 2 speakers + a subwoofer, but lately I'm trying 5.1 to see if it exists in my games.

 

This. Try on some proper headphones (head-fi.org has some nice reviews)(pls no beats audio ones), even budget ones + a proper DAC (asus xonar and x-fi go! pro are the cheapest but make a world's difference compared to stock sager, fiio e10 is good for music etc. xonar has dolby headphones which should be among the best space emulation out there.)

 

No games are encoded with height channels as far as I know. Some av receivers have a codec that implements height channels, but every review I've read said the difference is almost unnoticeable. How do you have your sound set up? I found the difference between 5.1 sound and stereo astounding when I used the opticical out to my home theatre system.

 

so whats a good usb soundcard then?

 

Interested in this as well^

 

Not entirely true. There are plenty of games that are programmed for general surround sound and sound cards that can make up the difference for the "missing" channels. On top of that, many games are programmed for more than 5.1 sound. One specific example being World of Warcraft.

I have been gaming with my 7.1 setup for several years and have never noticed any speakers not being utilized, let alone not being used properly. It absolutely creates a more enveloping experience, one you don't even realize until you have to go back to a 2.1 setup or simulated surround in headphones. I wouldn't trade my 7.1 for anything. If they made a sound card (and an AV Receiver) that could handle 9.2 Analog, I would definitely build that system.

The reason I specify analog is that most cards I know don't support Game surround via the optical (digital) out. I definitely think that with the prevalence of HTPC's the two industries need to start converging and creating games that support Digital Surround like all movies do today.