Good sound card?

[CorrupT88]

Mmm if you use the digital out it most probably wont make much difference. Although I have a xonar soundcard and a external dac which TBH is probably overkill and may well be a slight waste of money but oh well I have bought it now lol. But if you are using the analog out then you want a decent soundcard or even an external Dac although for your uses I would say a Xonar soundcard would be fine...

[powerarmour]

But then again, would the video card even be processing the sound as it would be going from HDMI to optical so the z-560 would process the sound. Or would the sound just get processes twice?

The video card will have a dedicated azalia HD spec audio converter, though the only processing that is done is the syncing of the video/audio output to create the HDMI signal, it's just digital-digital.

Besides most modern graphics cards fully support bitstreamed 7.1 output also, you can worry about the quality once you've sent it to your AV receiver