Home Theatre Question - Advantage of Dedicated Sound Card and Bluray Player

[jangovin]

Hi,

I have a question regarding my current HT setup where the current main input source is my gaming PC, and so naturally the HT is used for gaming and movies.

This is how the HT is currently configured:

Video - Gaming PC (HDMI via R9 290) -> Onkyo TX-NR626 -> Darbee Darblet -> LG TV
Sound - Gaming PC (HDMI via R9 290) -> Onkyo TX-NR626 -> KEF 5.1 speakers

While this setup gives quite good sound and video playback, I would like to know if there would be any benefit in doing either of the below:

1) Adding a dedicated sound card like Asus Xonar to transfer sound to the receiver - Will this improve the sound quality in any way as compared to the sound output from the graphics card?

2) Connecting a bluray player to play movies - Was considering buying a Pioneer BDP-450 to play all the movies from, but would this have any improvement on video quality as compared to playing from my PC? (using PowerDVD player on PC for this by the way). If there will be a benefit where in the above setup should the player be?

Thanks in advance

 

[ssddx]

1) you would lose out on lossless sound this way. optical and coax only support compressed 5.1 not uncompressed. only hdmi can support uncompressed. now there are hdmi supporting soundcards out there (rare but i've seen them) but unless you're getting all sorts of audio distortion i would say leave your setup as is.

2)for playing bluerays, not really. for playing dvds, maybe. i know dvds look better on my ps3 compared with my pc because of the nice upscaling job the ps3 does on non-hd content. it IS possible to upscale on your computer as well and if you used such a feature there would be no benefit at all. honestly the only real benefit i can see is convenience. if you have a bd/dvd player you do not need your pc on to play movies which means you could technically lay in bed and activate all sources from controllers (or have them set to turn off automatically after a time period). using a computer requires a little more input.

 

[jangovin]

Thanks for the reply bro. It seems there is no major benefit in bursting the wallet on this upgrade. Will look towards other areas.

Much appreciate it