sound card + digital out + Dolby Digital decoder = 5.1 sound?

[crapito]

question: does any sound card with a digital out have the ability to send a Dolby Digital signal out to a Dolby Digital decoder? my guess is yes.

I have an Onkyo TX-DS494 home theatre receiver that can decode Dolby Digital signals. I'd like to hook it to my spare computer that has an Aureal SuperQuad Vortex2 sound card with optical digital out. if I were to use something like PowerDVD XP 4.0 to watch a dvd movie, would my sound card be able to output a Dolby Digital signal?

I can't test my theory cause my motherboard just got RMA'ed today, but I am still curious, nonetheless.

thoughts? comments?

thanks.

 

[laugh]

should be a 'yes' for your aureal card.

 

[crapito]

here's some info I got from gamepc.com, in case anyone else cares....



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Using an Aureal SuperQuad Vortex2 card (also known as the Xitel Storm Platinum, among other names), I connected the optical jack straight into the speakers. It has been well documented that Windows will not output 4-channel audio via this optical jack to a high-end speaker setup. A PCM output can only be for two channels, and there would be some serious latency if an audio card had to encode to Dolby Digital for 3D audio effects (although it would be very cool). However, Dolby Digital can be "passed-through" a card to an optical output (this part goes for those cards with a coaxial S/PDIF, too) if you are using a software DVD player that is capable of AC-3 pass-through. Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Zoran's SoftDVD are among two of the apps I know that allow this function.
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