SlimPvC;141950 Wrote: > Don't know what you mean exactly here, but I'm playing DTS WAVS (= 6 > channel wavs) perfectly through the SB2. These are the wavs that play > extreme white noise when played undecoded. So I guess the SB2 is > capable of decoding these wav files on the fly and sending a digital > signal to the receiver?
It's not -- I wasn't clear. I was referring to WAV files containing 6 channels of uncompressed PCM audio. Your DTS WAVs actually contain specially encoded DTS data which is masquerading as PCM data. That's why they sound like white noise when played normally: most players think they're reading 2 channels of uncompressed PCM audio (it's all just bytes, after all) and the sound is horrible. That happens when the player is trying to convert the PCM data to an analog format to be sent to speakers (say, you have your PC hooked up to a pair of stereo speakers, and playing the WAV back through WinAmp or fb2k results in white noise). But if you have the player hooked up to a DTS-aware receiver using a digital connection, the playing software doesn't try to interpret the data and the receiver does the work instead -- and the receiver is clever enough to spot the DTS data and decode appropriately. You can connect a PC soundcard's S/PDIF output to a DTS-aware receiver and play DTS WAVs successfully (but you'll need to be careful that your OS and music playback software leave the volume alone -- for fb2k that means an attenuation of 0.00, and with Windows the volume slider needs to be at max IIRC (if you try this, turn your receiver's volume down very low at first in case I'm wrong!)). So anyway, the SB2 doesn't actually know anything about DTS WAVs. It does know that if it receives a WAV file and has been told to play it back at full volume over its digital output, it should shunt the data right out over the S/PDIF connection to the receiver, untouched. It's just a simple conduit for getting the DTS data from your PC to your DTS-aware receiver. (It's the same with Dolby Digital files from DVD, after they've been suitably wrapped in WAV format; DTS files from DVD too. DTS WAVs ripped direct from special DTS CDs can be passed through with no work at all.) So passing DTS and AC3 (Dolby Digital) data straight through to the receiver is what the SB2 can do now. Those are formats that the receiver can understand, and the SB2 need do no special work to pass them on. I'm wondering if there's another format (maybe an MPEG format?) that can carry 6 uncompressed channels and which is understood by many receivers. If there is such a format, perhaps it would be possible to decode MP3 Surround files on the SB2 and pump the 6 channels out over S/PDIF. Of course, in theory the SB2 could create an AC3 or DTS stream to get that data to the receiver, but I'd be surprised if the box had the horsepower to do so, and there may be licensing issues. (Plus it's a lossy-to-lossy conversion which isn't usually a great idea.) If receivers start to support MP3 Surround, it might be possible to just wrap such a file in a WAV container (as we can do for AC3/DTS files sourced from DVD) and pass it straight through. Would be nicer if the SB2 could support it though. -- smst ------------------------------------------------------------------------ smst's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=752 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28112 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
