Sound advice (1 Viewer)

cwinson

New Member
February 2, 2009
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Hi all - my first post, so please be gentle.

Firstly, congrats on the great product. I spent may years using a realmagic Xcard and associated TVEdia interface, but have now upgraded to a flat panel display, so can now go native digital. Interface (with Streamed MP ) is just spectacular.

Now to my problem....

The PC I have doesn't have an SPDIF out, so I have gone down the route of buying a USB -> SPDIF device. In fact, I've ended up with two:

M-Audio Transit
Maplin Sound Box

What I'm trying to achieve is bitperfect output for 2 channel PCM and DD/DTS passthrough for DVDs. Don't have any DTS audio discs, so it's all standard DVD-video soundtracks.

I can get things working with the M-Audio transit, but the problem is I can only choose between PCM and passthrough modes - there is no auto-detect, so it's a manual reconfigure which is not practical. If I did auto-detect, it would be ideal.

The Maplin Sound Box doesn't come with any drivers and registers itself as a "USB Audio" device. It works to some extent (i.e. I get sound), but I can't get it to passthrough DTS/DD - just appears as stereo on my home theater receiver. In MediaPortal, I get 4 options for audio renderer (USB Audio, Default DirectSound Device, Default WaveOut Device, DirectSound: USB Audio).

Have read lots online about kmixer, asio and the various driver options, but am still a bit confused. Trial and error hasn't got me anywhere either. So far, I have tried:

Audio decoder = AC3filter (configured for SPDIF passthrough of DD/DTS)
Audio decoder = ffdshow Audio Decoder (configured for SPDIF passthrough of DD/DTS)
Audio renderer = USB Audio
Audio renderer = DirectSound: USB Audio
Enable/disable "Use AC3 filter (for some soundcards using SPDIF)"
PureAudio plugin

Have also through about trying ASIO4ALL, but not sure if that is the right road to go down.

Also, I have installed PowerDVD in order to test another player - it doesn't even recognise that I have an SPDIF device in my configuration, which is odd. Windows Media Player does the same as Mediaportal in terms of stereo-only output.

Am I flogging a dead horse? Should I be expecting a vanilla USB->SPDIF dongle to do what I'm after, or do I need to look for a more advanced version of the M-Audio transit which does have auto-sense capability? hagusb perhaps?

Any help much appreciated
 

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