On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 mad-user-request@lists.mars.org wrote:

Anything with the ICEnsemble ICE1712 ENVY24 chip does excellent. This includes the Terratec EWX 24/96 and M-Audio Audiophile 2496 that George Pantazopoulos mentioned earlier. M-Audio makes several other boards that have the ICE1712, such as the Delta DiO 2496, Delta 66, etc. Hoontech/STAudio also has a board with this chip called the Soundtrack Audio DSP24 Value.

I might be beating a dead horse here, but maybe someone can save me some research. I'm looking for something that will just plain pass through the PCM data without any kind of resampling or mixing, over (preferably) fiber S/PDIF. Therefore I don't much care about the DA's, but high quality AD's would be nice. Balanced inputs would be a cool bonus, but aren't necessary.

I guess the point I'm making is that I don't want to go the traditional pro audio route, I want top-end home stereo, because for some reason I like the way they simulate five channels from stereo music sources. They invariably give a more pleasing and natural soundfield than two-channel setups in rooms with shitty acoustics.

On the other hand, Pro Logic II is good enough for that, so if anyone knows where I can get the following equipment at a reasonable cost, please pipe up:

24-bit variable sample rate stereo D/A w/toslink input A sound card that can feed it * note: i want toslink because the EMI in here is outrageous Pro Logic II decoder with center/rear tone,delay,level controls (3) 100w @ 8ohm mono amps (2) 50w @ 8ohm mono amps A rack to mount all this stuff in

Now, given those parameters, if I'm better off sticking with the SB Live! let me know.

Thanks, - Kevin