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optical/digital audio output S/PDIF

E

exitnow

Member
i have an optical output; S/PDIF on my chaintech vnf4 ultra and i was thinking of hooking it up to my stereo reciever. it this optical output any better than the regular output? does this optical output send a surround sound signal or stereo? i have only ever used one output like this years ago with a portable MD recorder and CD player. any thoughts or links are appreciated. also if anyone knows where to get a cheap cord.
 
I use a Chaintech AV-710 soundcard with digital optical out. I also got a new Soltek A64 board that has optical in and out, but I haven't tried it yet.

Your optical output will output a digital stereo signal for everything except sources that have been encoded with dolby digital. Your receiver should pick up this digital signal and should be able to use dolby pro logic on it (or any proprietary surround processing like Logic 7 in the case of my HK).

When you put in a DVD, the output should change to AC3 and with the appropriate AC3 filter installed, it should output a signal that your receiver should recognize and give you accurate DD sound.

Generally the optical output will be a better option than 1/8" stereo signals adapted to RCA. By using optical, you'll not use the DACs that your motherboard has. These tend to be of low quality until you spend a lot on an upper level soundcard. By outputting a digital signal, you let the DACs in your receiver to the work, and with a decent receiver, these should be good ones 🙂.

A good place for affordable optical cables is partsexpress.

examples:
3' dayton
6' dayton
12' dayton

I'm using a couple dayton audio cables now ant the build quality is excellent.
 
Yeah. I use the optical out on my AV710 with my JVC MD-9000 mini-disc system. Prior to that, I had my Fortissimo III hooked up to it using the optical out as well.
 
I use the SPDIF out on my DFI board because my logitech speaker set has built-in dolby digital and dts receiver with optical and coaxial connection. Get cheaper cables made by RCA/Philips/GE etc, no need for expensive monster cables. When I play dvd movies on my computer using ATI dvd player my receiver only gets stereo signal so i have to use simulated 5.1 from the receiver. I think the software dvd player has to support dolby digital output in order to get dolby digital signal (or maybe there's a setting somewhere i haven't figured out)
 
There should be a setting in the player to tell it to output to SPDIF, at least there was in both NVDVD and PowerDVD.

I think that that is one of the worst things about having a PC as a DVD player, you either have to pay a bunch of money for software that will allow a hardware card (Audigy for instance) to do it or else have to have an external device handle it. Either way, you'd end up spending a bunch more money to be able to get the real audio experience from your DVDs.
 
Coaxial and optical should be comparable and either will bypass crappy mobo/soundcard DACs.

With an Audigy and external decoder, disable software decoding both in the AudioHQ and the player (set both to SPDIF passthrough).

However, during those times when you may plug headphones into the receiver to discreetly watch a movie, you may want to toggle the player's headphone decoder options such as Dolby Heaphone, SRS TruSurroundXT, etc. Likewise, for stereo music, various DSP effects may be applied on the PC side via either the player or Creative's console (particularly CMSS 3D) for matrixed stereo PCM. But with a full featured receiver, you will prolly find it is easier to use the hardware DSP effects on that end.
 
What's a good inexpensive reciever to get? I want 5.1 sound, and to go ditigal from my Nforce2 audio (unless thats a bad idea?)...
 
Originally posted by: Trevelyan
What's a good inexpensive reciever to get? I want 5.1 sound, and to go ditigal from my Nforce2 audio (unless thats a bad idea?)...
Click to expand...

An onkyo 502 for $150 or a denon 1603 for $160 would be good choices if you're ok with going refurbished.

You can get a new unit for cheap, but it's not going to be near the quality of those refurbished units.

Setting up your computer to a HT is a great idea. You can easily get sound that's better than any computer speaker set made by klipsch logitech or creative.

Do you have any speakers picked out yet?

 
If you are going with a receiver setup I recommend Infinity speakers. If you can find some reference 2000.1 speakers on ebay I highly recommend them.
 
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