S/PDIF audio 5.1 channel

[SubKamran]

Has anyone here hooked up their PC to their home theater system via S/PDIF? I heard you can use a digital coax cable for it.

I want to know how to do this...I need to play D3 in 5.1 channel

 

[Subz]

yah i do it. works great. just plug in your digital coaxial to ure receiver and pc. not that hard. also make sure that your receiver is set to pickup the pc which is dvd/tv mode i guess. i dunno

 

[SubKamran]

Have you tried using it with games?

I hooked it up using a RCA cable (for temp) and when I went to Test the speakers, sound wouldn't come out of the rear ones. :| Maybe it was the RCA cable.

 

[dscowboy]

Unless you have an nForce board with SoundStorm, you won't be able to play D3 with _digital_ 5.1. However, if your speaker/receiver setup can handle it, you can connect them to the analog ports on your sound card and get 5.1 sound.

The reason is that with games, all sound is dynamic, so to get Dolby Digital sound from games it would have to be encoded in real time. The SoundStorm technology on the nForce boards can do this, but there is no other consumer PC hardware that can. A software encoder is probably not feasible at this point. Based on quotes from id employees it originally seemed that Doom3 would do DD encoding on the fly, but that turned out to be false.

So anyway, no, digital 5.1 will not work in Doom3 or any other game, unless you have SoundStorm. Analog 5.1 works as long as your speakers/receiver can handle it.

 

[SubKamran]

Unless you have an nForce board with SoundStorm, you won't be able to play D3 with _digital_ 5.1. However, if your speaker/receiver setup can handle it, you can connect them to the analog ports on your sound card and get 5.1 sound.

The reason is that with games, all sound is dynamic, so to get Dolby Digital sound from games it would have to be encoded in real time. The SoundStorm technology on the nForce boards can do this, but there is no other consumer PC hardware that can. A software encoder is probably not feasible at this point. Based on quotes from id employees it originally seemed that Doom3 would do DD encoding on the fly, but that turned out to be false.

So anyway, no, digital 5.1 will not work in Doom3 or any other game, unless you have SoundStorm. Analog 5.1 works as long as your speakers/receiver can handle it.

So basically, I need to buy a 5.1 system? I guess I could do that...cheap stuff, Logitech.

 

[Black-Falcon]

z-640's work great w/ D3...this is from experience.