HDMI on panny SA-XR70

[cph2000]

Has anyone given the HDMI input on the panasonic SA-XR70 a try ? It would be very nice if all six channels could be hooked up to a PC using true digital transmission (im thinking using the digital xover stuff in foobar etc. for a 3way system).

The questions remain:
- are there anyway to get HDMI sound from PC to a receiver ?
- can the 6 channels in the panny be feed using PCM data from the HDMI input (i.e. is it all 6 channels and is DTS or AC3 needed)

A HDMI soundcard and the panny could be a speaker tweakers dream

[motherone]

Why do you need to use HDMI? You can poke around for soundcards that put out a 6 channel datastream. I have one, but I can't recall the manufacturer (it's boxed up right now from moving).

I'm not aware of ANY HDMI capable soundcards, though.

[cph2000]

I can't see how I would get a six channel PCM stream into the panny without using the HDMI input, if going through one of the spdif inputs, I beleave that the data would have to be AC3 or DTS encoded ?

[motherone]

The HDMI interface only supports compressed audio formats (DTS, AC-3, etc.)

http://www.lashen.com/vendors/calrad/hdmi_dvi.asp

I think you're out of luck unless you can find a way to encode it via S/PDIF or some other method.

I wonder if there is anything out there that lets you encode to a compressed audio stream?

[tiroth]

motherone, I think you must be mistaken. From the link you sent:

Supports compressed audio formats such as Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital EX, DTS, DTS EX.. Driven by the DVD-Audio standard, audio support consists of 1-8 uncompressed audio streams with a sample rate of up to 48, 96 or 192 kHz, depending on the video format. It can alternately carry a compressed multi-channel audio stream at sample rates up to 192 kHz, up to 24-bits.

Now, the Panny may well not support uncompressed-over-HDMI, but the spec seems to.

[cph2000]

If you study the panny manual, it says that it will do DVD audio through HDMI, it also seems that most/all? of the processing features are disabled when using HDMI - it is as if the DVD player does the decoding of the formats. It also says that the input is HDMI 1.1 compliant !
http://service.us.panasonic.com/OPERMANPDF/SAXR70.PDF