EggXpert

Ok, I was looking at an ExpressCard soundcard, but these solutions were too expensive for me. So I decided to look at a USB sound card for 5.1. My question is, will this card cooperate with HDCP or whatever Blu-Ray uses? I am getting a Gateway P-173XL which has no onboard surround and I would like surround for my Blu-Ray movies.

 

Thanks!

This Silver. or This Black.

are u sure that this would work?also does hdcp apply to external sound cards?

anybody have an idea?

If you're talking about getting true HD audio from your Blu Ray player, you're not going to get it on most sound cards....at least the ones in the budget range.  The sound card has to support DTS-MA or TrueHD.  That's the first caveat.  The second is that HD audio can only be transmitted one of two ways....via HDMI (HDCP support implied) or multiple analog inputs (which means you're not getting the pure digital feed.)

I don't care about having completely true HD audio, it is going to a set of X-540 70 watt speakers (I think the model number is right), all I want is a the audio to go to each respective speaker.

If you don't care about HD audio, then get any sound card which supports coax or Toslink optical.  By default, if you output audio from a Blu Ray player using one of these methods, it down grades the audio to the respective compressed and lossy audio such as AC3.

does the x-500 series have toslink or coax? Are there any external cards that support coax or toslink?

Here's one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829101151