I never noticed "surround sound" makes plain old stereo music sound any better.

blurks wrote:

I never noticed "surround sound" makes plain old stereo music sound any better.

It makes a difference for DVD Audio and concert Blu-Rays.

I'm convinced dionb was talking about "music" not obscure niche media types no one actually listens to.

blurks wrote:

I'm convinced dionb was talking about "music" not obscure niche media types no one actually listens to.

We are sitting here playing on 30 year old computers and you are dissing DVD Audio because it's obscure? That's kind of funny..

In that case you may scratch CDs as well because, news for you, they are basically just as extinct as DVD Audio.

I'm calling them niche and obscure as their market share was and still is pitiful, while CD's and digital stereo music files (2 channels!) in whatever format you prefer have been the way to go for over 20 years now - in case of CD's actually for over 30 years although market share is dwindling down. DVD Audio was a dead horse when introduced and never recovered from the rather underwhelming market response.
When we talk about listening to music, in 95% we actually mean CD's, vinyl, cassettes or digital stereo audio - all of them mono/stereo. I think that should be common knowledge. Wild guess: Probably 99% of enduser audio/music is stereo, especially when looking at those new and hip streaming services which provide their content in groundbreaking stereo. Why would anyone consider a digital surround system for listening stereo music? Makes absolutely no sense.

blurks wrote:

I'm calling them niche and obscure as their market share was and still is pitiful, while CD's and digital stereo music files (2 channels!) in whatever format you prefer have been the way to go for over 20 years now - in case of CD's actually for over 30 years although market share is dwindling down. DVD Audio was a dead horse when introduced and never recovered from the rather underwhelming market response.
When we talk about listening to music, in 95% we actually mean CD's, vinyl, cassettes or digital stereo audio - all of them mono/stereo. I think that should be common knowledge. Wild guess: Probably 99% of enduser audio/music is stereo, especially when looking at those new and hip streaming services which provide their content in groundbreaking stereo. Why would anyone consider a digital surround system for listening stereo music? Makes absolutely no sense.

Not sure I 100% agree with this, although my experience is less music and more retro console. I know early consoles would use pro-logic which encoded "surround" audio onto stereo channels and gave more depth, but this needed a pro-logic decoder to properly play. Although I'm just being pedantic 😉 Took me a while to track down an old pro-logic 1 decoder to use with my old consoles and its surround sound - but it does sound more immersive.

Although audio is that wonderfully subjective region that spawns entire forums of its own. Sound card vs DAC. Discrete vs combined. Fibre vs copper. SFX vs pure. Headphones vs speakers (and then monitors vs shaped outputs). And even with surround - virtual vs 7.1. I'd definitely agree that modern sound cards using high-end components and poly caps will sound better than an old ISA card with electrolytics or tantalum caps. But then a well built DAC will beat that anyway but needs a digital input from somewhere.

I like to play back stereo music on a surround system sometimes, but I'm not likely to use a sound card or software to do the 2-ch to multichannel conversion. That's probably better handled by a good DPL or DPL-II receiver. I'm fine using an analog output from the sound card though. Most of the early digital audio interfaces were hopeless anyway. SPDIF is OK as long as you're within the limits of what it can do (2-ch, or compressed DD streams). It really wasn't until we started using video cards as audio output devices (thanks to HDMI) that we got a good multi-channel digital audio interface. And at this point, there are so many purpose-built streaming audio devices that are so much more convenient than a WinAmp playlist that I don't really care anymore. PCs pretty much missed the whole AV-integration boat by being fundamentally incompatible by design.

Merdian Audio Trifield is excellent for 2ch to surround processing, It’s the only thing I’ve come across that truely works well.

dionb wrote:

In 2009 (ten years ago), you'd have been able to keep literally everything except the CPU, motherboard and GPU (and possibly PSU if you went over-the-top on GPU) from a 1999 ATX build.

A 1999 PSU would have been pretty much useless in 2009. Not only did the power requirements go through the roof in the intervening years, most of the connectors had also changed. 20-pin main ATX connector became 24-pin, most molex connectors got replaced by SATA and 2009 motherboards required an additional 4- or 8-pin ATX12V connector. Granted, you could deal with all of these by using a bunch of adapters.

But you couldn't so easily deal with the increased power requirements, especially on the 12V rail. In 1999, 12V was used to power hard drives, fans and little else; by 2009, the it was pretty much the only rail that mattered in terms of power rating. Most 1999 PSUs used were in the 250-300W range, rated for about 7-10A at 12V. That's what a ~100-120W modern PSU would supply, so you can imagine what kind of PC you could power with it in 2009.

Then some other components from 1999 would also have been (mostly) obsolete by 2009 - the floppy certainly, most optical drives due to upcoming new formats, hard drives due to limited capacity, CRTs gave way to LCDs. USB was a thing in 1999, but most 2009 devices would be either incompatible or cripplingly slow. TV-tuners, MPEG decoders, they were made either obsolete or redundant. That doesn't leave much that you could still be using in 2009 from your 1999 build. The case, keyboard, maybe sound card (if you were an early PCI sound card adopter). Mouse... well, maybe if you could stomach using a ball mouse again. So in the end not really that much different when compared to using 1989 components in 1999.