Mac Pro's soundcard?

[GIZBUG]

It looks like there is no way to upgrade the soundcard on the macpro. Is this correct? Right now I have an Creative Labs X-FI on my pc, and think its sound quality is great, and love being able to hook up my 4.1 klipsch speakers front and rear. Looking at the mac pro, not sure if it allows me to hook up front and back speakers.

 

[pengu]

Mac Pro (and g5 before it) has Optical Digital in and out.

 

[fiercetiger224]

Too bad Creative is lame and doesn't wanna make a PCI Express version of their X-Fi soundcards.

Cuz I've got an Audigy in my PC right now and refuse to upgrade to a PCI version of X-Fi if they're eventually going to make a PCI Express version. And they'll have to...They've already got a few Realtek based sound cards on the PCI Express interface...

 

[CanadaRAM]

You can run an optical line to a receiver or a powered speaker set that has optical digital in and onboard decoder, otherwise you can use this http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/firewave/

 

[GIZBUG]

So your saying I can not fully utilize my 4.1 Klipsch speakers with the default config of a mac pro, I would have to buy an addon accessory?

 

[damado]

I've been wanting to get some kind of good sound quality device to use in both windows (for my games) and OSX (for my music) but solutions like the firewave only work in osx =(

 

[trainguy77]

Yeah I want a sound card so I can get surround sound for games, but i want it to work in XP and os x

 

[Sesshi]

Creative have already said why they won't do PCI-E soundcards for a while until they've cracked the problem of a soundcard over PCI-E slowing down the bus.

You can upgrade the experience certainly for listening-only purposes. There are a lot of pro soundcards out there that work with both Windows and Macs... some really good Firewire ones. These won't do anything for your games though.