megamoo

I tried the rca connection from the sound card to the receiver and yeah it sounds good, but not really a huge change. I've changed all the settings in the computer that I can get at as well. I guess I've done everything short of getting some good speakers.

Wow lots of great advice and stuff for me to research and think about. I appreciate ALL the replies, but I'll just quote the ones I can say something to at the moment. I've accepted that I'll have to get better speakers at some point, its just a matter of saving up. Yes the sub-woofer does have an adjustable low pass filter. I could probably stretch $300 for a pair of bookshelf speakers. I use itunes primarily for music, and I have a large collection with a few years of data such as plays etc. I'd not want to go through the process of setting up everything on a new player unless it gave a noticeable improvement in quality. I've done some researching and what is the best audiophile player seems to be a much debated topic. Also been messing around with tunes' quicktime settings and also the xonar sample rates and the there are differences. An article from 2010 says that windows unnecessarily processes the signal rather than let it go straight from itunes to soundcard, and my receiver has its own weird settings that do things to the sound, need to find the manual . I will have to take some time to play around with it all. Of course doing that is all free, just takes time. That's a good idea! Wouldn't have thought of that. Very easy test. +1 I have read a lot that says exactly that. Until I do get some good speakers I'll try to optimise everything else. I don't know. Can't see anything related to preamp in the manual? Don't really have any experience in what they are or do. More research for me to look into.

Ok my wording on that last post's edit could be taken wrong. I haven't solved the problem at all, I still get all audio made by the computer going to all outputs simultaneously.

I want to get better sound quality out of my setup and I'm wondering where any weak links or bottlenecks are. What and where would it be possible to optimise, tweak or upgrade. Also I'm on a very limited budget. I listen to lots of different styles of music and most of it is 320kps mp3 and I mainly use itunes 10.7, but I also have some flac files and use foobar sometimes. PC has windows 7 64bit, with a Asus Xonar Essence STX card. I use the card's optical output to a Sherwood RD-6506 AV Receiver, with Sherwood Sondido Satellite Speakers. I have read that speakers are always the first thing to improve but I doubt I could afford anything better than what I have now. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Hi I'm sure this is an easy fix but I can't figure it out. I've tried searching for an existing thread talking about it but i must be using the wrong jargon. I've got two different monitors setup in different rooms and I want to output two different audio signals from my computer. So for instance, have itunes playing in one room and vlc media player in another. I'm using windows 7 and a xonar essence stx. At the moment I have an optical output to a sound system in one room and the headphone jack on a long cord to speakers in the other room. But everything plays from both outputs at the same time. How do I send each application to a specific separate output? Thanks for any help. edit: both outputs I'm using are on the xonar card and I just had to change a few things on the Xonar Audio Center to get them both to work at once.