6 channel digital output via pci-e

[MarkHathaway]

Hello everyone, its been quite a few years since I've been here, lots of new faces.


I'm looking for a 6 channel (or greater) digital output sound card. I've seen the RME HDSPe AES32 and the Lynx AES16 cards. Are there any others? I've googled till it hurts but cannot find much else.


I really want a card that will do Dolby Digital AC3 and True HD decoding. Not pass through, but decoding, so I have standard PCM on each AES stream, so I can use external dac's and eq's (TAct RCS 2.0). I have a HTPC hooked up to a projector, and want AES x 3 (6 chanels) so I can externally process and then run into my three stereo dacs

Both the RME and Lynx are studio cards that don't appear to do this. If there are no other options, I'm going to do something similar to what MWP did to his Maudio Revolution and replace the Dac chip on a Creative X-fi board with 3 AES transmitter chips on a little daughter board.



Thanks for any help,

Regards,
Mark

 

[phofman]

Most cards do the decoding in SW (drivers) and claim to support the format. Any 192/24 card with multiple channels and digital outputs will suffice provided the compressed audio is decoded by the playback SW. AFAIK it is against licencing terms to decode TrueHD formats outside of the protected audio path, i.e. in SW and feed to digital (i.e. undegraded) outputs. E.g. recent ffmpeg should be able to decode the TrueHD format (unofficially, of course), I have nothing to test it with.