Do I need a sound card in this scheme?

Question

HTPC

The question is how is the sound output to the home theater.
Mat. The MSI 970A-G46 board goes to the Panasonic SA-PT860 5.1 home theater via a Toslink optical cable, as I understand it, the transmission goes in a maximum of two channels.
If you buy an Asus Xonar DG sound card and connect a Toslink cable through it, will the sound get better?
Please explain the scheme for outputting sound from a computer to a home cinema.

Answer 1

An external sound card will give better sound in 99% of cases. Because it is shielded from the internal noise and interference of the computer, which are created in abundance by coolers, hard and other. Well, most likely the codecs are better there, power stabilization ...

Answer 2

Different audio streams/formats can be transmitted via optics, and there is no direct limitation on two channels. And then the question is what kind of sound and where is it planned to output?
If you need to output the finished sound in digital formats (LPCM, DD5.1, DTS, etc.), then the player you use is configured to output the original stream (without decoding) to Toslink, and the receiver from the home theater kit will deal with decoding.
If we are talking about the sound that programs / games form, then most likely the output of Toslink will be only stereo (PCM), because. it is very unlikely that the built-in sound card can pack multi-channel audio into a digital multi-channel format (the same DD 5.1 for example).
In both cases, when connected via Toslink, a receiver / amplifier from the DC kit will be used to convert sound from digital to analog, and the quality of the output sound will be determined by the quality of the decoder and DAC of the receiver, not the audio card.
Therefore, you need to clearly understand what an external sound card can give you, compared to the built-in one, taking into account your configuration.
According to the description of the audio card, we can say that it can give better sound quality (compared to the built-in one) in the case of an analog connection to an amplifier and speakers.