PC based digital crossover with dolby digital live

[preiter]

Here's an idea I had.

Take PC-based digital crossover software and feed the outputs into a dolby digital live codec.

This would allow you to plug a single digital output into a (for example) 6.1 home theater receiver and feed 2 3-way speakers and a bonus subwoofer output.

It would be a very cost-effective way to create a digital, actively-crossed speaker system with all of your DACs and amplifier channels in one box.

Is there any existing PC-based crossover software which would make this doable on Windows 7?

[lazycatken]

As I know, Dolby Digital is lossy compression format.
Seems not appropriated for loudspeaker crossover...

[preiter]

It could be any digital transport standard that can be encoded on the fly and compatible with most home theater receivers.

Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, DVD-Audio are all multi-channel formats and lossless, but I'm not sure they can be encoded on the fly.

[lazycatken]

Originally Posted by preiter

It could be any digital transport standard that can be encoded on the fly and compatible with most home theater receivers.

Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, DVD-Audio are all multi-channel formats and lossless, but I'm not sure they can be encoded on the fly.

Seems good idea to make cost lower. How's quality?
In HiFi point of view, most home theater amplifier are not good enough for music... Any candidate?

[gooki]

Why not use HDMI - you can send multichannel PCM, 8 descrete channels are supported by most hardware, and no need to do any "live encoding".

And if you don't want to use a receiver, but separate amps instead, use an HDMI Audio DAC. between PC and AMP (or preamps depending if your doing volume control on the PC or not).

[dangus]

Ah, I get it. The choice is between using the multichannel analog input on the receiver (if it has a set of jacks for that), or HDMI. Then do the crossover in the PC, either all in software, or by exploiting the DSP goodness in the sound card.

It might be good for prototyping a multiamped system before building it with real amps and active crossovers.

[jwmbro]

Originally Posted by gooki

Why not use HDMI - you can send multichannel PCM, 8 descrete channels are supported by most hardware, and no need to do any "live encoding".

Though most receivers will only amp 7 of those 8 channels - still enough for two 3-ways though.

[Theo404]

So are there 'receivers' that will take hdmi from a modern graphics card (they all do it these days, and are easy to put out PCM streams on) and deal with all the HDCP nonsense and give you clean I^2S stream 8x24bitx192Khz?

Any that dont cost hundreds of dollars due to pointless licences for content protection I hate, on video I dont care about?

[gooki]

Yes, but public availability is pretty much no existent because of HDCP rules which means you can only have a maximum of 2 channels of digital out, not the full eight on a retail product.

You can get HDMI decoders that take care of the HDCP and give you 2 channel spdif + 8 channels of analog audio. You could possibly bypass the DACs and get 8 channels of i2s.

Here's a decoder board I have on hand.

[preiter]

Originally Posted by Theo404

So are there 'receivers' that will take hdmi from a modern graphics card (they all do it these days, and are easy to put out PCM streams on) and deal with all the HDCP nonsense and give you clean I^2S stream 8x24bitx192Khz?

Any that dont cost hundreds of dollars due to pointless licences for content protection I hate, on video I dont care about?

The receivers exist, they are the basis of most home theater systems. They come in any price range you can imagine.

All that is missing is the software to encode multiple channels of PC audio (from PC-based crossover software), into a digital stream that the receivers would understand. If we had that, we would have an easy solution for active, digitally-crossed speakers rather than the usual DCX2496 -> 6-channel volume control -> multiple amps solution.