> This is a correction to the above statement.  Dean Kukral reminded me that
> audio is analog and that at some point the digital audio has to
> be converted
> to analog.  I went back to Creative's web site and their digital speakers
> for the
> digital theatre sound system include a 24 bit Dolby Digital to analog
> processor, so it appears that you are right.   The output is digital until
> the Dolby receiver processes it.  According to Creative this is
> supposed to
> produce better sound.  Whether it is hype or not I don't know,
> all I did was
> repeat Creative's info on the SB Live.  They do not mention on their lower
> end digital speaker systems how the sound or whether the sound is
> converted
> or not.  Maybe some other more knowledgeable lister knows this
> information.

     As a sort of addendum, digital outs are not really so important if you
are just going to pump the sound out to speakers. After all you'll be going
analog eventually anyways, doing it earlier does introduce a slight amount
of extra noise but it is so little one shouldn't even concern themselves
with it (I doubt very much you'd be able to hear the additional noise from
the speakers). The main reason for using a digital source is if you have a
digital in somewhere to record, be it an MD player, DAT or computer. This is
where a digital out becomes really important since you can make perfect
digital copies. Back when digital outs on component CD players were rare
this was quite important since you could transfer a CD digitally to a DAT
and edit digitally. However now that almost every DVD player has a digital
out, most CD players have them, and almost all CDROMs support DAE (Digital
Audio Extraction) the feature is less important. Just my two cents, TTYL

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