The instructions below are unnecessary for the pass-through method.
It should then only depend on the receiving device whether it is capable of decoding the stream or not. If you can change the volume, you must set it to 100%. To make this work, all you need to do is force your media player to pass through the encoded stream, and ensure that the outgoing ‘audio’ is not altered by a volume control or anything else. With the advent of HDMI, it has become possible and common to send the stream over the HDMI cable. The most popular way to send the AC3 or DTS stream to external decoders used to be over an optical cable, often called S/PDIF or TOSLink. The second way is to keep the undecoded surround stream intact and pass it through to a smarter external device like a surround receiver, which then does the decoding to its six (or more) outputs. That is the method to which the list of instructions below applies. These outputs are connected to an amplifier through analog cables. All the card does, is pass the raw decoded audio to the analog outputs, it does not decode anything. The first is to decode the surround stream on the computer itself and send the six (or more) channels of raw audio to a dumb sound card like the CM6206 that has six (or more) outputs.
#5.1 AUDIO PLAYER FOR MAC MAC#
There are two very distinct ways to get surround sound out of your Mac (or any computer). The most popular standards for encoding 5.1 audio in a bitstream of 1.5 Mbit or less are Dolby Digital (AC3) and DTS. A decoder that does not recognise the encoding will output a terrible noise because that is what one gets when trying to treat compressed data as PCM sound. Instead of treating it as stereo sound, it interprets it as digital data and decodes it, just like an MP3 player decodes the compressed data in an MP3 file. A surround-capable decoder recognises this special stream. Because the transmission is all digital, there is no risk of degradation that could destroy the information in the compressed data. The compressed stream is then transmitted as if it were a regular stereo stream. The trick is to compress the six separate channels into a bitstream that is not larger than an uncompressed (so-called PCM) stereo stream of about 1.5 Mbit/s.
#5.1 AUDIO PLAYER FOR MAC UPGRADE#
After a while people wanted to upgrade to surround, and history repeated itself in a certain way.įor many years, digital 5.1 surround has actually been a bit of a clever hack of the existing S/PDIF standard that only supported uncompressed stereo audio. Then came digital sound which originally only supported stereo. This has some limitations, but works pretty well nevertheless.
#5.1 AUDIO PLAYER FOR MAC PRO#
In the analog-only era, there were already certain systems like Dolby Pro Logic that rely on ‘multiplexing’ extra channels into a stereo signal by means of phase differences. Can I use my Mac as a surround decoder?įirst a short introduction about how digital consumer surround sound works.Setting up a Multi-channel Sound Card: the Procedure.Multichannel Output versus Pass-through.
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