Reliable digital surround sound from a laptop

2010-12-23 06:33:59

So here is my dilemma: A properly calibrated home theater receiver is waiting to reproduce surround sound (Left-center-right and two rear speakers). I wish to rely on Toslink for this job, as the THX Select2 certified receiver has several of these inputs available. And the receiver is specified to handle 96 KHz sources (e.g. DTS, PCM), and a long list of Dolby Digital formats.

But the laptop I am about to get, incredibly, has no S/PDIF coax or toslink. So I need to get an adapter. Could be USB, Firewire, ExpressCard/34. And it's Windows 7.

Several devices are selling on Ebay claiming to do S/PDIF (often with the C-Media chipset), some at the 48 KHz rate, some at 96 KHz.

Now my goal is to a) spend little money and b) get a lot of good audio from a). Good audio in this case is surround sound.
Hifi purists will all be gone after reading that I suppose, leaving the pragmatic "let's get the correct sound out of each speaker at 0.05% THD and that'll be really just great" types like me.

So my question is, have you purchased a low-cost device that does the job properly time and time again? That the 5.1 indicator lights up on the receiver all the time?

I would like to know about it!

Reliable digital surround sound from a laptop

Reply #1 – 2010-12-23 07:42:43

There used to be a nice little optical USB dongle called the Sondigo Callisto. But Sondigo went under and it's not available anymore. This was a 5.1 device that did Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive. What these did was take the 5.1 PCM stream, and encode real-time into DD or DTS 5.1, for transmission to receivers. There's a similar Turtle Beach device that claims to do the same, but I don't see the Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect (which Interactive is part of) logos anywhere. If this doesn't work, look for devices that announce either DDL or DTS Connect.

By the way, many media players now have this feature in software. You can even use ffdshow with pretty much any DirectShow player and make it encode to DD for transmission through any SPDIF or HDMI connection (HDMI in most cases nowadays would be pointless though, since it's already capable of uncompressed multichannel). Another great little tool that can do this with most DirectShow players is ReClock, which is an audio renderer. The difference with this and the hardware solutions is that the hardware DDL and DTS Connect solutions will work with everything, not just those compatible players.

Reliable digital surround sound from a laptop

Reply #2 – 2010-12-23 17:52:56

If you're playing DVDs, almost any device with Toslink (S/PDIF) should work.  There should ba a "passthrough" mode that takes the Dolby/DTS off the DVD and sends it to the receiver without alteration.