Friend needs help

[mohawk32]

Hi. I connected my creative elite pro sound card (£250) to an Onkyo txsr876 home cinema amp (£800). I have good speakers attached.

The end result was it sounded poor, nowhere near as good as listening to dvd or cd audio. I Have tried disabling the onboard audio chip in bios, using analogue, digital and coaxial ouputs into the Onkyo, but no difference.

 

What i wanted to know are there any amps specially designed for pc audio. I am sure there must be some difference between dvd and pc audio, perhaps pc soundcards are more compatiable with some amps more then others.

 

Many thanks in advance. John.

[Plastic Nev]

Hi and welcome to Extreme Tech Support - Free PC Help mohawk,

Which socket on the sound card did you connect the amplifier to? ideally it should be the line out one. Also which input on the amp? I don't know that particular one but does it have a line in socket? If you used say speaker out on the card, and then say microphone in on the amp, there will be a terrible mismatch of what is know as impedance, this would account for your poor sound quality as the end result. You need to use both line out on the card, and line in on the Amp for best results.