Optical Out to Receiver

Ive been reading a lot about this lately... and trying to determine what to look for in a sound card if I want to get good 5.1 surround from my PC to my receiver via a digital optical cable connection.

For the record... I just bought a Z79 ASRock mobo ... and it came with a GameBlaster sound card by Creative (Realtec3D ??). This only gives 2 channel audio to my receiver. But to be honest the sound quality does have a 'surround' feel to it and Im starting to like the performance more and more each day.

However, Ive been reading a lot about needing a card with Dobly Digital Live or DTX encoding in order to get true surround to my receiver via an optical cable.

this lead my search to 3 possible cards I was looking at, all with these DDL and DTX features:

HT Omega Striker 7.1 - $80

HT Omega claro II - $180

HT Omega Halo (out of stock) - $200

Now further research... Ive been reading lately about if I use the digital connection to the receiver, it bypasses the sound card Digital to Analog Connection (DAC), and because of this, you shouldnt waste your money on an expensive chip-set if you are using this type of connection.

well this makes me sad and really started to confuse me....

Does anyone have any light they can shed on this?

(TL/DR):

SHould I buy the HT Omega Halo so I can have a DDL encoding card.. even tho I will use an optical cable to the receiver?

Or if I go for the cheaper Striker 7.1 (also with DDL)... will it give me true 5.1 without being outmatched by my original (and newer) GameBlaster?

Thanks for the link Bonza... I will read as soon as I have an op.

The funny thing about the on-board audio is that is is disabled as soon as you plug in the gameblaster device that came with it... therefore I never even tried it. I will laugh if I had DDL this whole time on-board, but not on the sound device that came with the box in the Z79 ASRock Extreme6 /GB. I will say that I did not see DDL or DTX anywhere on the product specs on newegg.

Also there is no way to configure the GameBlaster... it calls for a program called THX TruStudio Pro... but I can only download THX TruStudio (which would only configure the onboard). And couldnt you guess... that the non-pro version does not recongize any device on my comp because my on-board is disabled... but I digress

so I did reach out to ASRock last week... here was their one line response:

Hi Vincenzo,

The application you mentioned THX TruStudio can be download at below link but not the Pro version. For the 5.1 setting with receiver, I?m sorry I don?t know how. Please see below image for sound blaster output ports and usage. Hope this will a little help for you.

Then they provided a link to the non-working TruStudio that I already downloaded... and posted a bunch of pics from the manual.. true story

looks like Im up a creek here... thanks for listening Boz