eweitzman
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2004
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You're correct in what you're saying, but there's more.
Just think about mp3 playback for a minute. Two channels of stereo are encoded into 32 or so low bitrate, frequency-limited channels. Possibly with joint stereo processing that collapses some channel pairs into single channels. Or flac for that matter: two channels of PCM are encoded as polynomial coefficients and correction bits. How do you play these through your DAC1? Your media player (foobar, winamp, whatever) converts these mishmashes into two channel PCM which the DAC1 then converts to analog.
Now take a six channel format. Different encoding, more channels in the end, but the same deal in theory. Hardware support is another matter, but I don't see any reason why a multichannel pro audio interface couldn't spit out six discrete (digital) PCM channels after the DTS/DD data has been decoded, leaving the D-to-A conversion to something else, like a triplet of DAC1s.
Maybe this isn't done for commercial or licensing reasons. Can somebody who knows chime in?
- Eric
Just think about mp3 playback for a minute. Two channels of stereo are encoded into 32 or so low bitrate, frequency-limited channels. Possibly with joint stereo processing that collapses some channel pairs into single channels. Or flac for that matter: two channels of PCM are encoded as polynomial coefficients and correction bits. How do you play these through your DAC1? Your media player (foobar, winamp, whatever) converts these mishmashes into two channel PCM which the DAC1 then converts to analog.
Now take a six channel format. Different encoding, more channels in the end, but the same deal in theory. Hardware support is another matter, but I don't see any reason why a multichannel pro audio interface couldn't spit out six discrete (digital) PCM channels after the DTS/DD data has been decoded, leaving the D-to-A conversion to something else, like a triplet of DAC1s.
Maybe this isn't done for commercial or licensing reasons. Can somebody who knows chime in?
- Eric