Digital sound not working: optical to RCA SPDIF adapter busted?

[Ionizer86]

Yesterday I bought one of these adapters at Radio shack. I take my optical wire, plug one end into my Shuttle SN45G's optical audio out and the other end into the optical in on the adapter. Then I get an RCA cable and hook one end to the coax out on the adapter and the other end into the speakers.

As soon as I run the nVidia speaker wizard and change the system to digital out, I find that the speakers make a reverberating hissing sound when the wizard is sending noise to the speakers. And weirdly enough, I have 2.1 speakers, but they still make sounds when the wizard is testing the center and rear speakers.

After I appropriately configure the setup to 2 speakers, I can't get any other sound at all.

 

[Ionizer86]

^

 

[Auric]

Does your "speaker/amp kit" have a digital decoder and if so are you using a coaxial cable (aka video or digital audio) and not braided (aka analog audio)?

 

[Nebor]

It sounds as if you're trying to run a digital connection into analog speakers...

 

[Pariah]

A quick glance at his rigs page shows him using BA digital speakers, so the problem is not plugging a digital signal directly into the speakers. I'm not familiar with the onboard audio you are using or how it is supposed to be setup, so maybe someone else can help you with that. It does sound like you have it cabled correctly though. If the tos-coax adapter requires power, make sure the adapter is plugged in.

 

[Accord99]

It sounds like you're feeding a DD signal into the BA 735, which can only handle 2 channel PCM. Can you confirm that the DD encoding feature is disabled?

 

[Ionizer86]

Yea, the adapter's power is plugged in. I'm pretty sure that the speakers have a digital decoder since they work fine with the digital output from the 3.5mm digital jack on the Santa Cruz on my desktop rig. I'm using a spare RCA cable I found lying around; not sure if that makes a difference.

I'm using the nVidia NVMixer wizard from the latest driver package. Strangely enough, when it's testing speakers I don't have (like rear right, rear left, center, etc) I still get a sound through the 2.1 speakers that I do have.

Actually, messing around with it right now, I got it working by telling it that I don't hear stuff from the back and center speakers... weird

Thanks everyone! I finally got it