If you had a SoundStorm or an Xbox, then you know what Dolby Digital Live is.  Basically, it encodes any audio source, from your PC or console, into Dolby Digital for playback on your home theatre system.  Creative has CMSS-3D, an algorithm that upmixes stereo (games, movies, etc) to 5.1 channel sound, but it is an analog solution and comes at a cost of slightly degraded sound fidelity.  DTS-Connect offers the same as DD Live, and encodes any source for your home theatre, but has much higher bitrates than DD Live for the potential of much higher fidelity.

Both DD Live and DTS encoding technologies allow you to stuff 5.1 channel sound information down a single digital pipe to your A/V receiver for playback.  The high-quality sound can be boiled down to bandwidth.  DD Live is limited to 448Kbps on DVD’s (HD-DVD is the same, too), which makes DTS the winner with a least possible encoding rate of 754Kbps.  The increased bitrate of DTS allows for fidelity that is higher than a standard CD, which makes it quite desirable.  While I don’t have a preference for either one, the good news is that it won’t matter what media you use with the HDA X-Plosion, you’ll be able to play it, no problem.

Digital inputs are optional with Auzentech's HDA DIM-X10 Digital Input Module

What’s more interesting is that the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 encodes everything into DDL or DTS in real time.  Hear the Windows ‘DING!’ in full, glorious 5.1 sound!  Since it is a hardware-based solution, it is very low latency, and won’t perceptibly impact games or movies.  We’ll explore the performance issues a little later on in the review.