Since I'm bi-amping the front three mains in my cinema, I'm going to need more than one Xonar to cover all speaker requirements. By my reckoning I'm going to need ten speaker outs plus 'X' number of sub outs.
Two Xonar DSX's will cover the requirement for me but can JR MC18/19 handle two discrete SC's OK or will there be issues?
I could get one pro audio card with sixteen analogue outs but they're expensive....or one with enough AES outs but
I have no desire to run external multi channel DACS.
Thanks
I run a bi-amped system as well. I can tell you that, generally speaking, two or more soundcards are not a good solution for an integrated system due to sync issues. Most modern DACs are either asynchronous or use a buffering system designed to effectively separate them from the PC's clock (to achieve better jitter performance). For that reason, JRiver cannot necessarily sync two soundcards in a way that will be close enough for bi-amping. If the sound interfaces in question can accept an external clock or somehow otherwise be forced into sync, it will potentially work, but, as I recall, the Xonar DSX's don't have the ability to accept an external sync (the higher end Xonars definitely don't).
I struggled with this issue for a very long time, and tried syncing multiple DACs in a variety of configurations. Very few of them worked, and the one's that did work, didn't work well enough. Ultimately I settled on an 8 output pro-audio interface (Steinberg UR824) as the best solution for me. There are numerous threads on this topic if you want more reading on the subject, both about trying to use multiple cards and about eight channel (or more) interfaces.
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=55607.0http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79235.0http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=80165.0But the bottom line is, if you want to use multiple interfaces, the hardware needs to be able to support external syncing somehow.
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Topic: Two ASUS Xonar DSX PCIe soundcards (Read 3527 times)