Good multichannel amp for desktop PC?

[Nathan Raymond]

I use a set of Energy Take Classic 5.1 speakers for surround sound on my desktop PC, primarily for gaming:

https://www.energy-speakers.com/products/take-classic/?sku=TK-CLASSI-5-1

Sound comes from a Cubilux 7.1 USB Surround Sound (plug and play, uses standard USB audio drivers):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CKPL5HXZ/

Right now I take the 5.1 analog audio outs and have them going into the 5.1 "Direct" inputs of an old Onkyo TX-SR304:

https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/onkyo/tx-sr304.shtml

The receiver is on a rolling cart under my desk, and has a lot of additional functions I don't need (occasionally I bump it with my leg and change a setting accidentally). It would be nice if it did bass management, but the 5.1 direct input is not in the path of any signal processing, so no bass management. I've been on the lookout for something simpler and a bit smaller, affordable, and I really couldn't find much. 5.1 analog direct inputs were included on a lot of receivers back when SACD was a thing and for connecting DVD players that had their own surround decoders, but these days you only see pre ins and outs on the the upper end/flagship receivers, which would be total overkill. I don't want a bunch of small amps, and I don't want a giant multi-channel dedicated amp box either. I think I found something that might work (also about two decades old, so some risk) - the Elan D660. I have one on it's way to me now:

http://www.elanportal.com/supportdocs/catalog/d-im-d660.pdf

Intended for the pro installer market, it does six channels of amplification, all class-T. Hopefully it works well. Anyone know of any other options out there? Maybe something more current from the pro installer market in case this old one doesn't do the job? And if these old products do end up being my best option, any suggestions on keeping them running for years to come (i.e. should I plan to have the capacitors replaced at some point)?

Additional background: I used to use a Creative Sound Blaster X7 Limited Edition and a couple of class-T desktop amps to drive the center and surrounds, with the Sound Blaster providing some decent controls over the crossover point for the subwoofer and speaker delays:

https://us.creative.com/p/archived-products/sound-blaster-x7-limited-edition

There was a time on Windows PCs when Creative's EAX sound APIs were the gold standard, and even supported height information it could use when rendering the sound field (they had a good headphone HRTF so I found it particularly effective). Microsoft changed their driver architecture many years ago, and Creative provided legacy support both through a custom OpenAL driver and a DLL you could install alongside game executables to intercept the old system calls via a software solution called ALchemy that they bundled with the X7 and some of their other Sound Blaster products. Creative is no longer developing ALchemy and it is was largely limited to their hardware, which was frustrating, but people have come up with similar solutions for free that work with any modern sound card, such as this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65094

Physically, the Sound Blaster X7 was a lot of buttons to press to turn things on and off, knobs sometimes got bumped accidentally changing the volume levels on the center and surround channels with the additional amps, and there were a lot of wires needed to hook everything up and power everything. Switching from headphone to speakers or speakers to headphones while keeping the headphones plugged in, while possible, was a lot of clicking in the Creative software UI every time. And the Sound Blaster X7 is a discontinued product.

Once I learned the details about Equalizer APO and that it could do bass management, and with no real need for Creative ALchemy, I sought out a simpler USB based sound solution, which is how I ended up with the Cubilux 7.1. Between the Cubilux 7.1 and my amp I have a Pro-Ject Audio Systems Head Box S2 headphone amplifier, which has a pass-through line input, so to switch between speakers and headphones I don't need to plug/unplug anything, just change the speaker mode from 5.1 to 2.0, and turn on the headphone amp. I found I can easily do this with the free Nirsoft Sound Volume View app, which accepts optional parameters such as "/SetSpeakersConfig" so I have preset shortcuts set up via the command line to easily change the speaker mode with a click:

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sound_volume_view.html

It also has "/SetSpatial" so I could create presets for different spatial audio processing as well. Overall, it's been great to move away from proprietary drivers for audio and switch to something that just uses standard built-in USB audio drivers.

Side note: Windows does have a very short list of games that can output Atmos audio with true height channels, but I'm not aware of any good near field Atmos solutions. I'm not going to ceiling mount speakers for my PC, don't want a big Atmos receiver connected to my PC, and I don't think Atmos sound bars are designed to work for near field listening.

 

[kyuu]

For your particular situation I don't really see a better option at these extremely low price points than what you're trying.

I'm curious why you're insistent on doing this in such a old-fashioned manner, however. You can send multichannel audio out of your PC through HDMI or S/PDIF nowadays. Is that not something you're interested in?

 

[Nathan Raymond]

For your particular situation I don't really see a better option at these extremely low price points than what you're trying.

I'm curious why you're insistent on doing this in such a old-fashioned manner, however. You can send multichannel audio out of your PC through HDMI or S/PDIF nowadays. Is that not something you're interested in?

My PC monitor is connected via DisplayPort, which is the preferred way to connect an HDR high-refresh computer monitor, not HDMI. No way to get multichannel audio out of my monitor. Even if I connected a monitor via HDMI to my computer, that would require a receiver (or something with the ability to decode multi-channel digital audio and ultimately drive 5.1 speakers) with the video signal being sent along with the audio, with the HDMI audio device between the computer and monitor so that it can present it's capabilities to the computer so the computer knows there is something that can handle multichannel lossless audio.

S/PDIF output from a computer does not support lossless multichannel audio, it only has the bandwidth for two-channel lossless. Using DVD/Blu-Ray playback software you can bitstream lossy Dolby Digital (AC-3) and DTS audio over the S/PDIF interface, but the options to send lossy multichannel PC audio (from a game for instance) are limited and are not bundled with Windows. Some sound cards offer it as an extra feature, and present a virtual 5.1 sound device to the operating system and then do realtime lossy compression to Dolby Digital or DTS (which takes some CPU overhead and adds some latency) and then sends that out over the S/PDIF connection. The commercial name for those solutions is Dolby Digital Live/DTS Interactive. Some on-board audio solutions from Realtek supported it officially, and there are ways to unofficially hack support into a broader range of on-board Realtek audio solutions, but I'm not interested in that. And even then, you'd still need an external Dolby Digital/DTS decoder and a way to drive speakers.

I could just use a set of "PC 5.1 speakers", i.e. a set of speakers with 5.1 analog inputs and built-in amplifiers for all the speakers designed for use with a computer, but I prefer the quality of the Energy Take Classic 5.1 (which is 5 passive speakers and one amplified subwoofer) and I'm pretty sure even my old Onkyo receiver is better solution than the amps they include in most PC speakers. Also PC 5.1 speakers aren't inexpensive, typically ranging in price from $400-$550 (Logitech Z906, SteelSeries Arena 9). What I've put together is likely better quality at a lower cost and gives me greater long-term flexibility, especially with my placement of a high-quality headphone amplifier directly as a passthrough device in the L and R channels.

 

[kyuu]

My PC monitor is connected via DisplayPort, which is the preferred way to connect an HDR high-refresh computer monitor, not HDMI.

What resolution and refresh rate are we talking here? Is it beyond what HDMI can support? I have nothing against Displayport, but when you're interfacing with consumer equipment you're generally dealing with HDMI which, depending what version your hardware supports, shouldn't have any issue supporting high resolutions at high refresh rates with HDR. Unless it's something unusual.

And even then, you'd still need an external Dolby Digital/DTS decoder and a way to drive speakers.

Yes, an AVR.

Like I said, for what you're trying to do, the solution you've settled on might be the best way to go. Particularly if you don't want to spend a lot of money.

But using HDMI to an AVR is certainly an option. There are options that aren't giant ugly boxes these days too.

 

[Nathan Raymond]

What resolution and refresh rate are we talking here? Is it beyond what HDMI can support? I have nothing against Displayport, but when you're interfacing with consumer equipment you're generally dealing with HDMI which, depending what version your hardware supports, shouldn't have any issue supporting high resolutions at high refresh rates with HDR. Unless it's something unusual.

I checked, and you're correct that in this case the monitor I'm using, a Samsung Odyssey Neo G7, supports 4k HDR 165Hz VRR 12-bit video over HDMI 2.1, so no loss there compared to DisplayPort 1.4 (I have other monitors where the HDMI inputs on the monitor are inferior to the DisplayPort). The res and features I'm using mean I'd need to get at least an HDMI 2.1 receiver.

Yes, an AVR.

Like I said, for what you're trying to do, the solution you've settled on might be the best way to go. Particularly if you don't want to spend a lot of money.

But using HDMI to an AVR is certainly an option. There are options that aren't giant ugly boxes these days too.

I checked, and there are some receivers, such as the Onkyo TX-SR3100, with HDMI 2.1a that go on sale for $250, but I'm going to guess the amp quality isn't stellar at that price. Probably ok for my desktop PC use, if I decide to go the modern receiver route (i.e. if the old amps I'm trying to use give up the ghost one of these days). I sure do wish someone made something smaller and simpler though - a modern, affordable 5 channel class-D or class-T desktop amp. I'm hoping the old Elan D660 can fill that role.

 

[JonnyK]

If it helps, here's my setup.

My PC has a 4.1 system running through a home theater receiver (Anthem Mrx510). Video goes to the monitor via DisplayPort as usual, which gives high refresh and gsync functionality. Audio is a separate HDMI connection directly to the receiver from the video card. I've got an Nvidia GPU which has multiple outputs, including HDMI, and it does support audio.

In Windows the receiver is detected as an audio video device. By the nature of HDMI you must send a video signal to get audio. So Windows thinks I have an extra monitor. I don't have a choice in that, so I keep this extra invisible monitor configured so it's unused and diagonal from the regular screen in the upper right corner (my mouse cursor won't move over to it at the edge of the screen this way).

I then configure the receiver as the default audio device and feed it 4.1 PCM lossless audio. It all works quite well, with no need for specialty audio hardware. All I do it feed a lossless digital HDMI signal to the receiver and it does all the rest.

It is a bit annoying that I've got a second ghost monitor. Sometimes Windows tries to put a window on that screen, but I've learned that if I click a window in the taskbar and it doesn't show then it's on the second screen and I can move it over with a Windows keystroke "Win+Left" (which moves the selected window left over to the current screen).

Good luck.

 

[richardm]

I have a similar set of requirements. The only realistic options I've found are the same two you've found -- either 5.1/7.1 analog to a multichannel amp or else HDMI to an A/V receiver.

Presently I have the latter and I'm using EqAPO for bass management.

The res and features I'm using mean I'd need to get at least an HDMI 2.1 receiver.

Why? Windows lets me run the A/V receiver at basically any resolution and refresh rate (independent of the monitors). I've needed to use the AVR's HDMI out only once to access some menu items. Otherwise it runs "headless."

To solve the "phantom monitor" issue I've mirrored the receiver with one of my four monitors -- even in this config I can run the receiver at 24Hz (to minimize pixel clock over a long cable run) and the mirrored display at 60Hz. The panels are connected to a dGPU and the receiver is connected to the motherboard's HDMI (driven by the processor's iGPU).

Have you seen this thread? One person reported that mirroring made the mirrored display laggy... I haven't seen this but then again I haven't loaded up any games either.

For the future I have my eye on this. I've yet to hear about anyone building with this module so I've no idea if it sucks. The "sound card" portion is an old C-Media chip with sub-par specs but IMHO for most of us I reckon it'd be acoustically transparent (i.e. good enough). It's probably the same chip as your Cubilux USB.

 

[Clmrt]

I use a set of Energy Take Classic 5.1 speakers for surround sound on my desktop PC, primarily for gaming:

https://www.energy-speakers.com/products/take-classic/?sku=TK-CLASSI-5-1

Sound comes from a Cubilux 7.1 USB Surround Sound (plug and play, uses standard USB audio drivers):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CKPL5HXZ/

Right now I take the 5.1 analog audio outs and have them going into the 5.1 "Direct" inputs of an old Onkyo TX-SR304:

https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/onkyo/tx-sr304.shtml

The receiver is on a rolling cart under my desk, and has a lot of additional functions I don't need (occasionally I bump it with my leg and change a setting accidentally). It would be nice if it did bass management, but the 5.1 direct input is not in the path of any signal processing, so no bass management. I've been on the lookout for something simpler and a bit smaller, affordable, and I really couldn't find much. 5.1 analog direct inputs were included on a lot of receivers back when SACD was a thing and for connecting DVD players that had their own surround decoders, but these days you only see pre ins and outs on the the upper end/flagship receivers, which would be total overkill. I don't want a bunch of small amps, and I don't want a giant multi-channel dedicated amp box either. I think I found something that might work (also about two decades old, so some risk) - the Elan D660. I have one on it's way to me now:

http://www.elanportal.com/supportdocs/catalog/d-im-d660.pdf

Intended for the pro installer market, it does six channels of amplification, all class-T. Hopefully it works well. Anyone know of any other options out there? Maybe something more current from the pro installer market in case this old one doesn't do the job? And if these old products do end up being my best option, any suggestions on keeping them running for years to come (i.e. should I plan to have the capacitors replaced at some point)?

Additional background: I used to use a Creative Sound Blaster X7 Limited Edition and a couple of class-T desktop amps to drive the center and surrounds, with the Sound Blaster providing some decent controls over the crossover point for the subwoofer and speaker delays:

https://us.creative.com/p/archived-products/sound-blaster-x7-limited-edition

There was a time on Windows PCs when Creative's EAX sound APIs were the gold standard, and even supported height information it could use when rendering the sound field (they had a good headphone HRTF so I found it particularly effective). Microsoft changed their driver architecture many years ago, and Creative provided legacy support both through a custom OpenAL driver and a DLL you could install alongside game executables to intercept the old system calls via a software solution called ALchemy that they bundled with the X7 and some of their other Sound Blaster products. Creative is no longer developing ALchemy and it is was largely limited to their hardware, which was frustrating, but people have come up with similar solutions for free that work with any modern sound card, such as this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65094

Physically, the Sound Blaster X7 was a lot of buttons to press to turn things on and off, knobs sometimes got bumped accidentally changing the volume levels on the center and surround channels with the additional amps, and there were a lot of wires needed to hook everything up and power everything. Switching from headphone to speakers or speakers to headphones while keeping the headphones plugged in, while possible, was a lot of clicking in the Creative software UI every time. And the Sound Blaster X7 is a discontinued product.

Once I learned the details about Equalizer APO and that it could do bass management, and with no real need for Creative ALchemy, I sought out a simpler USB based sound solution, which is how I ended up with the Cubilux 7.1. Between the Cubilux 7.1 and my amp I have a Pro-Ject Audio Systems Head Box S2 headphone amplifier, which has a pass-through line input, so to switch between speakers and headphones I don't need to plug/unplug anything, just change the speaker mode from 5.1 to 2.0, and turn on the headphone amp. I found I can easily do this with the free Nirsoft Sound Volume View app, which accepts optional parameters such as "/SetSpeakersConfig" so I have preset shortcuts set up via the command line to easily change the speaker mode with a click:

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sound_volume_view.html

It also has "/SetSpatial" so I could create presets for different spatial audio processing as well. Overall, it's been great to move away from proprietary drivers for audio and switch to something that just uses standard built-in USB audio drivers.

Side note: Windows does have a very short list of games that can output Atmos audio with true height channels, but I'm not aware of any good near field Atmos solutions. I'm not going to ceiling mount speakers for my PC, don't want a big Atmos receiver connected to my PC, and I don't think Atmos sound bars are designed to work for near field listening.

How did the D660 work out?

 

[HudsonWard]

Thank you so much for the info.

 

[Nathan Raymond]

How did the D660 work out?

Sadly the D660 wasn't something I had in working condition for long. Within 48 hours of receiving it, it died (no magic smoke or anything, and still partly powers up, but internal relays started to go off-on-off-on increasingly rapidly over a period of about an hour until the relays fell silent). During the time I had it, it sounded good, and I was in the process of level-adjusting it with the subwoofer (because it didn't have a subwoofer out, and I needed to run the sub output from the Cubilux 7.1 directly to the sub, it meant that volume control on the D660 was only controlling the non-sub channels, so I would need to control overall volume via the software volume control in Windows once the sub was level-matched).

Anyway I'm back to the old Onkyo 5.1 receiver for now. It works ok. I did get an HDMI 2.1 cable and tried it with my monitor instead of Displayport, but ran into two issues with that which leans me away from using HDMI, at least with my current hardware:

1) For whatever reason, my Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 32 inch 4k UHD Monitor would not display the initial pre-OS (BIOS/UEFI) splash screen from my computer, whereas DisplayPort does. Thinking it might be an issue fixed by a firmware update for my monitor, I searched for and found a firmware update, put it on a USB thumb drive, plugged it into my monitor and went through the firmware update process, but no improvement. The lack anything on the screen during boot turned out to be a signficant issue with 57x.xx (no amount of clean installs either through NVIDIA's installer or DDU improved things), where Windows would often boot to a black screen and when Windows did boot, there were lots of BSODs (this is on a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti). I was briefly concerned I was experiencing hardware issues, so I switched back to DisplayPort where at least I could see the boot process. NVIDIA driver version 572.42 was so consistently terrible I reverted back to 566.36, and as soon as I did, I had the return of complete stability (no more black screens, no more BSODs). I'm not sure who's at fault (Samsung or NVIDIA) for why I don't see the BIOS splash via HDMI, but it's a pretty seriously shortcoming IMO.

2) If I decided to ignore all those issues and get an HDMI receiver and route the audio and video through it, while I would potentially gain a way to have Dolby Atmos and/or DTS:X audio with height-based channels coming from my PC, audio over HDMI presents some very specific challenges on a PC that can be very frustrating in my experience (I have an HTPC which has audio going through my Denon receiver). On a PC, by default Windows stops sending any digital audio output when no sound is playing. On my Denon receiver, there is a 1-2 second delay before it will play sound encoded via Dolby or DTS, and sometimes the receiver just doesn't recognize the audio stream at all and stays silent even though the PC is playing sound. Not sure who's at fault, Microsoft or Denon, but it is annoying... someone did write a piece of software called "SoundKeeper" to work around the issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/htpc/comments/vn3iuy/fixing_the_delay_when_starting_audio_from_windows

The SoundKeeper website is down right now for some reason, here is the Internet Archive capture of the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250130011520/http://veg.by/en/projects/soundkeeper/

While I am glad someone wrote this software to work around these issues, I think this functionality should be built into Windows. There's another issues related to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on PC which is also frustrating, and that has to do with legacy software (at least some games, such as the earlier LEGO titles published by TT Games) which uses some sound libraries which just can't cope when Windows has it's sound output sampling rate set above 48Khz. Those titles will just silently quit on launch (there is an error code recorded in the Windows Application Log if you go looking for it). This means that if you want to use some legacy software, but want to use Dolby or DTS sound (or just have higher than 48Khz sound playback enabled), you need to remember to change your audio output settings in Windows before launching certain titles.

Right now, with the way I have things set up with the Cubilux 7.1 USB sound device, I just keep things set at 48Khz and run the analog outs for the 5.1 channels to the old Onkyo receiver and never have to worry about anything not working.

 

[JonnyK]

Use DisplayPort for your monitor, and separately run HDMI for audio only (don't run your monitor through the receiver). That way your boot should still use just the primary screen and you won't lose visibility, and DisplayPort trends to support higher refresh and resolution than AV gear anyway so a direct connection is preferred for PC screens. HDMI does a handshake thing when detecting an AV device, and you need Windows to handle it, not sure the low level PC bios would do it, HDMI joins the party after Windows boots.

With a separate HDMI, Windows can be configured to use it as an audio device. Set it up using PCM audio, no Dolby or DTS encoding. This way you get lossless uncompressed 5.1 direct to the receiver with no lag or lost audio due to surround formats compressing and decompressing. The windows audio system should handle everything and games you run don't need the details. 48 kHz seems to be typical for PC audio, you could run 96 kHz for the system settings which should resample cleaner to handle a variety of sample rates, I think.

Further, certain apps can still send a bitstream over HDMI and bypass the windows sound system if you want (like video players with content featuring surround formats), but for gaming PCM audio tends to work well.

 

[richardm]

1) For whatever reason, my Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 32 inch 4k UHD Monitor would not display the initial pre-OS (BIOS/UEFI) splash screen from my computer, whereas DisplayPort does. Thinking it might be an issue fixed by a firmware update for my monitor, I searched for and found a firmware update, put it on a USB thumb drive, plugged it into my monitor and went through the firmware update process, but no improvement. The lack anything on the screen during boot turned out to be a signficant issue with 57x.xx (no amount of clean installs either through NVIDIA's installer or DDU improved things), where Windows would often boot to a black screen and when Windows did boot, there were lots of BSODs (this is on a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti). I was briefly concerned I was experiencing hardware issues, so I switched back to DisplayPort where at least I could see the boot process. NVIDIA driver version 572.42 was so consistently terrible I reverted back to 566.36, and as soon as I did, I had the return of complete stability (no more black screens, no more BSODs). I'm not sure who's at fault (Samsung or NVIDIA) for why I don't see the BIOS splash via HDMI, but it's a pretty seriously shortcoming IMO.

There were known bugs in recent nVidia drivers. Allegedly fixed in the 572.70 release.

Does your mainboard have its own HDMI output from an iGPU? If so you might have the ability to specify the nVidia dGPU as the primary display device. Use the iGPU output as your "sound card."