Multiple Sound Card Question

My google fu seems weak today, can't seem to find what I am looking for. A guy I do some computer work for called me wanting to know if we could setup a media PC in his game room with multiple sound cards, so say it could show a movie in the game room, play MP3's in the kitchen, and play a different song in his office.

The ideal physical setup would be one computer in the game room, 3 sound cards in the computer, 3 speaker setups with wires from each setup going to one of the sound cards. I can see where this would be simple in theory by using software to control the sound. I can also see this being one massive hardware conflict.

Any ideas? :confused

 

Hmmmm.... that's a heck of a concept.... multiple sound cards streaming different audio to different speakers in different rooms. CRAZY!!! LOL From what I know, this is not possible But then again, I haven't done any research on this. I know from experience that if you try to run on-board audio and a sound card at the same time, the audio gets routed to only one of 'em (how it decides, I have no idea, but I know you get audio from only one line-out). You'd think that in this day of modern tech marvels that someone would have created "SLI Audio".... I'll do some Google-Kwon-Do and see if I can find anything for you Fred....

 

Thanks Dlb. It has me a bit confrused as well. You can run 2 separate GPUs in one box without SLI and each can run the folding program. Device manager sees 2 separate GPU's. Sound cards, well, honestly I always use the onboard, don't have a couple to test.

 

I know admins and moderators in this forum do not like members just suggesting someone use Google, so I'll understand if this post gets deleted. But, just thought I'd mention that a search on multiple sound cards does yield what appears to be some relevant info. For example, you may find this discussion helpful: multiple sound cards/outputs requried

 

Thanks Usavet! Like I said, my google fu was a bit weak. Google will usually work for me. Interesting link. Normally for a computer question like this I would just load up a box with a bunch of sound cards and separate speakers and test away, but I always use the on board sound.

Was hoping someone had done this with a media PC.

 

Kinda thinking out loud here. Perhaps an easier and more effective solution would be a fairly high end Quad or Dual core media server in the theater room, running multiple NICs to computers in each additional room hooked up to the rooms speakers. With Gig NICs the only bottleneck would be the hard drive(s).

The computers in each room could be pretty low end, they would just need to use a Gig NIC, and play a dang movie or song.

Ideas and thoughts are welcome! :-D