Moth3r said:
adywan said:
EDIT: just done a short rerecord of the laserdisc 5.1 but this time i recorded it with the soundblaster X-FI crystalizer enabled and this seems to have cured a lot of the problems and also made the whole mix amazingly better. I think i may well go with the laserdisc audio for this project now if all goes well with the whole recording

Woah just a minute, I'm sorry but alarm bells are ringing now.

When you "record" an AC-3 stream off laserdisc surely the stream that you end up with is bit-for-bit identical to the digital data stored on the laserdisc?

The "sound" that comes over the SPDIF is effectively just "noise" (as it's encoded digital data). So how would running it through a proprietary processing system improve it?

Oh and BTW I Googled X-Fi and found this:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=54212

Thats how i originally recorded the audio,bit for bit through the optical front input of my sound card, which didn't have a great result, but this time i tried a different approach and recorded it using "what you can hear" with the crystalizer enabled and the difference is amazing. it still has the obvious auto volume effect, but to a lesser degree and the clarity is so much better

That link is for the cheaper x-fi xtreme audio card. The one i have is the fatality which has a different chipset. I've never listened to all the hype about this range of cards. i got it just because it had the front input bay with optical input & output , coaxial input & output, midi, full size microphone jack & standard phono inputs and it was on offer at half price when i got it. i have to say though that it is a damn good soundcard now they fixed the drivers bug when it first came out. The crystalizer really does improve the audio on many sources. You want to hear the ROTJ soundtrack through it. no more muddy sound

And thanks ChainsawAsh :)