Last year, we took a look at HDA's first entry into the discrete sound card market, the X-Mystique, and were mighty impressed. HDA, coupled with new company Auzentech, have now released their successor to this board - The X-Plosion, which brings all of the features that made the X-Mystique what it was to the table and more besides. The big addition to the X-Plosion along those same lines is support for DTS' equivalent to Dolby Digital Live, named DTS Connect. The X-Plosion is actually the first sound card to support this functionality, adding a rather nice feather to its cap. As with Dolby Digital Live, DTS Connect allows on-the-fly encoding of audio, only this time using the rival DTS standard for digital audio, producing a digital bitstream that any DTS capable decoder will be capable of making use of. As well as this, the X-Plosion is also capable of handing the full bit-rate of which DTS is capable (1.5Mbps), allowing for a full audio experience in the smallish number of DVD titles that make use of this high bitrate for audio.

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