Reasonably priced sound card or DAC that supports DTS/DD Live?

[Kevin_Walter]

I have an older receiver that supports DTS and DD 5.1 audio, and it's a great sounding system. The problem is that it's from the 90s, so there aren't any fancy HDMI passthroughs or anything like that for me to pipe my audio though. Instead, I use S/PDIF. This obviously works perfectly fine for movies, which have a pre-compressed 5.1 audio signal. However, games don't have compressed audio, for obvious reasons, and the raw 5.1 channel audio needs to be compressed by your audio solution before it's passed to the receiver.

 

The motherboard in my previous desktop was a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3. Actually a really decent board. The on-board audio supported DD Live/DTS, which was nice. However, my current build includes a Gigabyte Z170X-G5... which doesn't support any of it. If I watch video with compresses 5.1, my receiver recognizes it as it should. Just doesn't support 5.1 in any games.

 

So, as the title of this thread asks, could someone point me in the direction of a reasonably priced (~$100 US or so) sound card or DAC that supports compressed 5.1 DD/DTS audio through S/PDIF? The ones I've been looking at either don't seem to support it, or don't have it clearly listed in their specifications.

 

I'm not fussed about the drama between internal sound cards and DACs. The differences, to me, don't matter. As long as it's not so low-quality that it's going to distort the signal, I don't really care which I have.

 

Thanks.