Goodday, I have recently been given a Marantz PM7200 (lucky I know). I wish to use it in conjunction with my PC to play my music (mp3 format). I need a new soundcard to take full advantage of this nice new amp, but do not know what to get. I do not need 5.1 surround, so I can not help thinking that a simple but high-end stereo soundcard with RCA wuld be the best bet. Hope somebody can help me. Also, unfortunately, I am not rich so can not afford hundreds of dollars for the new soundcard. Thanks in advance for all and any advice. Regards, James
Here's a nice overview: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=12257 There's an Envy24HT based card (multichannel) with high resolution front channels while the rest is plain 16/48. It's very cheap ~ 30 $ IIRC but should be comparable to the m-audio and good terratec/auditrack cards mentioned in the link quality-wise for stereo use. Unfortunately I can't remember the name, but using the search function on hydrogenaudio you should be able to find it easily (it has been mentioned during the last 3 months there).
Hey! I'm gonna get one of those amps.. they're well cool and have an excellent review, 5 out of 5 stars I'm still trying to work out what speakers I'm gonna get for it, I like the look of the acoustic energy aegis evo 3's. Plus I'm also looking to get some decent speaker cable to hook it up with.
Thanks all for the helpful tips. As far as my amp goes, I have just bought a 'van der Hul D300 MK III' cinch interlink to connect it to the PC and have bought a 20 meter spool 'Oehlbach 4mm' speaker cable (gives great sound). Luckily, I live in Holland and the stuff I bought on German e-bay has set me back only 90 dollars (instead of at least twice that). I have 2 old Wharfedale Delta 50.2 speakers which will do for now, seeing as I have only about 100 bucks left for the soundcard. Still have not figured out which one to get, but thanks to this forum I am a lot closer.
I am setting the whole system up to be as high-end as possible (considering my budget). Connecting the amp to a soundcard with its own (goldplated) cinch connectors is definetly the way to go, seeing as this is where most sound quality is generally lost. So, I do not really need 5.1, but do need RCA or Cinch connectivety.
If you're located in Europe you could get a terratec aureon 5.1 sky (envy24ht based). You should be able to get it for < 70 Euros, at ebay even cheaper. It has 3 2channel minijack connectors but it would be easy to build an internal adaptor with more solid connectors. The problem with creative cards is that they resample all input to 48kHz in a crappy way, so you need some audio player that does decent resampling internally to avoid the soundcard resampling for playback of audio files (e.g. foobar2000 or winamp with plugin). Audio streams from Video are 48kHz anyway in most cases (at least if DVD has been the source and no resampling has happened).
