vaio NR-17G does it have 24bit/192khz decoder sound card?

i found the setting for sound
by going control panel > sound>realtek hd audio>properties>advanced

Question is do my soundcard have 24bit/192khz audio decoding capabilities ?
or , it is just a dummy setting in vista

if it has , i will not go for external card, coz it will giv little improvements !

 

i am feeding YAMAHA rxv361 avr from speaker out of this laptop , i am pleased with the sound,
i am newbie audiophile ..always looking for cost effective sound sources .

 

It's not a decoding setting, it can run in 24-bit 192 kHz natively. Vaio laptops may not have the best digital/analog converter in the world, and the amp circuitry is rather cheap, but the Realtek HD can handle quite high bit rates natively.

From an audio lover's point of view, it far exceeds the quality of e.g. the Soundblaster Audigy series, but still has a way to go before it is in the class of Midiman or Echo.

If you want to get the best possible audio quality when playing music, switch to foobar2000 as your music player and install the WASAPI plugin. That will bypass the Windows mixer and feed the digital signal unprocessed to the Realtek card. The downside is that the volume control will act delayed when you do this (no mixer, so the only way to change volume is to ask the driver to do it at the amp stage, and this takes as much time as the buffer length, by default 1 second). But the sound quality will improve quite audibly. For free.