floam said:
That's so crazy I might need an external sound card in my Mac Pro. How far off are decent PCI-Express implementations?
Unless Creative supports Macs in it's forthcoming PCI-E X-Fi's, there's nothing yet announced or rumoured that actually uses PCI-E. The X-Mod does have Mac drivers so there's a possibility of that happening.
You only really start to need PCI-E for audio if you're super-high-end gaming (where there'll be multiple layers of multichannel sound) or you're working with several hundred channels of audio. The amount of data that goes across the bus for audio is too small in general, so the exchange of suboptimal packet sizes in order to offer up audio without breaks means squirting audio in very small lumps across PCI-E actually ends up degrading the performance of the bus.
If you're more of a listener / DVD'er than a gamer, you're better off buying a Firewire soundcard. At the low end the Griffin 5.1 soundcard is supposed to be decent, although I'm not sure how much better it is in comparison to the Realtek ALC880. At the midpriced area there's the Focusrite Saffire LE, a 5.1 capable Firewire interface and if you don't mind using USB (and if you're only interested in 2 channels) there's the Headroom MicroDAC. At the higher end there's the Fireface 400, new 'baby' card from RME. I like the RME interfaces which are very clean in terms of audio, and very versatile in terms of interconnection.
The digital output from the ALC880 is once again not exactly stellar. If you're picky about audio, you are better off - even for digital interlinks - attaching it to a superior soundcard. But if you need to stick with the ALC880, you'll get the best results out of the digital output.
