5.1 surround connections

[ckbumps]

aight I have a technics dolby digital "ready" home theater reciever, and want to get a surround card wit built in dolby digital decoding. I am lookin at the sounblaster live 5.1 (either model) and am wondering if they actually have the 5.1 rca outputs. that is the only way I can connect to my reciever.
does the phillips acoustic edge have the 6 channel rca outputs?
any help would be appreciated

$If Money Is The Root Of All Evil Than I Must Be Goin To Heaven$

 

[Guest]

A Dolby Digital Ready receiver (5.1 analog) can be easily paired with either a Philips Acoustic Edge or one the SBLive! 5.1 cards. What you'll need to buy are 3 cables that go from a 3.5mm stereo plug to dual RCA plugs. The 3.5mm plugs connect at three places on that back of the sound card and the RCA plugs go into the receiver. These are paired as L/R Front, L/R Rear, and Center/Subwoofer. These cables are available at radio shack.

 

[Guest]

Are there any digital out connections that can be used to an AV receiver? The 5.1 will do but a digital connections would be a little cleaner.

Thanks,


Mbiker

 

[ckbumps]

does the acoustic edge have actually dolby digital decodeing or is it some other "similar" technology, I am a big music fan and want a really nice card
thanx alot!

$If Money Is The Root Of All Evil Than I Must Be Goin To Heaven$

 

[Guest]

Yep, both the SB Live! (Dolby Dig version) and the Accoustic Edge can do 5.1 decoding.

However, if you have a nice amp, it's better to feed the digital signal directly to the amp (in DTS or DD format) and let the AMP do the decoding.

The only problem with this is: no sound cards currently can ENCODE dolby digital format. So if you play games etc, you'll have to revert back to 5.1 (6 channel) analogue connections for the full surround experience.

 

[Guest]

I am facing an obscure problem... OK I can undestand that it cant encode DD on the fly but when I open the speaker control pannel, I dont get 5.1 signal to my stereo system, I only get front L and R. Isnt the test signal supposed to be in DD?

 

[Guest]

Nope, the digital output from you card uses the PCM (SPDIF) format, which is sterio only. If you want to test your amps DD functionality, take a look on the Creative install disk, they have some nice AC3 streams for you to play with. (Do a search - for files - *.AC3)

(Note: If you want to send DD directly to your amp, make sure that the DD decoding option, under the advanced tab is turned off)