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The innards of a PC is an inherently noisy environment, causing hiss and irritaiting computer bleeps to bleed through the speakers. I remember the original Sound Blaster 1.0 cards, which hissed terribly and had beeping sounds whenever the PC was doing something! Many sound quality and interference problems can be solved by relocating the sound card to another slot. All these require some trial-and-error as motherboards are built differently and the components used in each PC are likely to differ. Creative has come a long way. As each generation of Sound Blaster cards gradually improved on the audio performance, Creative has hit a high note with the Sound Blaster Live!. The outputs are as clean as they can get. There is no noticeable hiss at normal volumes, and the DACs built into the EMU10K1 are competent for most purposes. Hoontech brings this one step further. By relocating the DACs outside the noisy environment of the PC to an external box, there is less interference. Digital signals from the sound card go out through the digital connectors, to a cable, which then conencts behind the Digital Amp which will pass through its DACs and converted into analog audio which the human ear can discern. In this way, the sound signals from the sound card travel digitally all the way from the insides of the PC to an external source. Since digital signals are less susceptible to noise and interference, better sound can be obtained when using external DACs.
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The Digital Amp accepts 2 stereo digital inputs, for decoding the front and rear channels produced by the SBLive! If you have the full SBLive! version which was bundled with a Digital I/O card, it has only one coaxial digital output, so only the sound from the front channels are output. If you are using only 2 speakers, it would be okay to stick with the I/O card bundled by Creative. On the other hand, if you are a SBLive! Value user or you have a 4 speaker setup, it would be best to get Hoontech's Digital I/O Card so that you can send both the front and rear channels to the Digital Amp. As you can see in the picture on the left, Hoontech's Digital I/O Card has 2 yellow S/PDIF coaxial outputs to connect to the Digital Amp. If you have read our review for Hoontech's Digital I/O Card, you would have realised that the design of the card was largely influenced by the need to provide connectivity to the Digital Amp. This caused Hoontech to shrink the MIDI input and outputs, as well as the S/PDIF coaxial input to non-standard connectors. A 12V DC passthrough output from the PC's power supply (labeled POWER) was also squeezed into the I/O card to provide power for the Digital Amp.
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