Im using a chaintech 710A sound card on my HTPC for the purpose of using the optical out to conect to my HT reciever. What I need to know is how to play mp3's on the computer bypassing any volume controlls or processing (ex: winamp, windows eq/mixer, media player) to get a raw signal to the reciever as if I was playing a cd directly from a cd player's optical out.

I tried turning off the eq's in winamp and win media player but that just made the music sound flat and muffled.

Also, is there any difference in quality when playing music through a computer compared to a component cd player?

amy feed back would help, thanx!

to bypass the kmixer in windows your gonna have to use ASIO or Kernel Streaming.

a component CD player would have a DAC(digital to analog convertor) in it and the quality would probably depend on the quality of that.

[quote name='Jayman' date='Nov 18 2005, 10:45 PM' post='102391']
to bypass the kmixer in windows your gonna have to use ASIO or Kernel Streaming.

how would I do that?

Kernel Streaming and ASIO
Now these guides may not work perfectly but you can play around with settings until you get it right...thats what I had to do
What those do is let you do bitperfect streaming of audio to the receiver which means no converting so to test if this works you might want to find a DTS audio file online...this will be in .wav What makes this a perfect test is that DTS audio is 44khz (movie is 48khz so don't use that) and if you upsample 44 to 48 on the DTS your audio will get completely screwed up...all you will hear is the most annoying static sound ever...if bit perfect is working then you will hear the best quality sound your system can handle