[jhenderson010759]

I am looking for a modern PCI or Firewire-based sound card featuring one SPDIF input and three to four SPDIF outputs which may be used concurrently under Windows XP. DirectSound drivers are required. D/As are optional. Flexible on price.

Any suggestions?

 

[Edwood]

RME Hammerfall HDSP 9652 has 3 optical SPDIF outputs.
http://www.rme-audio.com/english/hdsp/hdsp9652.htm

A bit spendy, though.



If you are not concerned with with the small degradation you will get with using a toslink distribution amplifier, you can use what I do, which is a 4 output Toslink Distribution Amplifier (Splitter). Much cheaper solution.

Toslink Digital Splitter
http://www.inday.com/tlda1/tlda1.htm

Coax Digital Splitter
http://www.inday.com/vda-1/vda1.htm

Then you will need a Soundcard with a single input and output.

-Ed

 

[jhenderson010759]

Ed -

Thanks for the reply. I will download the RME manual. But, to clarify, I intend to drive different signals to each SPDIF output simultaneously. So, a dist box won't work for me.

 

[Edwood]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhenderson010759 Ed - Thanks for the reply. I will download the RME manual. But, to clarify, I intend to drive different signals to each SPDIF output simultaneously. So, a dist box won't work for me.

Ah, more of your crazy cool testing?

Sounds interesting.

I hope the RME HDSP 9652 is up to the task.

-Ed

 

[jhenderson010759]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edwood Ah, more of your crazy cool testing? ...-Ed

On my primary stereo rig, I am experimenting with ambience recovery. I'd like to use some MTMs that I built last year for the rear channels. But, they use DCX2496 electronic crossover, which has digital inputs. I want to keep all signals, including the ambience channels in the digital domain until amplification.

I found a piece of SW on SourceForge which implements Dolby ProLogicII music mode via a PC through a soundcard. So, I'm planning on building a quiet PC to run this SW.

 

[dwk]

The standard answer for this is the Lynx AES-16. 8 pairs of ditigal outputs. It actually is AES/EBU out, but you can generally convert this to spdif-compatible with an xlr->rca cable. If not, you may have to get transformers to do it.

Alesis sells the AI-4 which is a 4-spdif<->ADAT box. 8 channels supported at 44/48, and I think you can run at 96 with a reduced channel count. Pair it up with say an Emu1212 which supports ADAT

The Emu 1820 versions have two useable spdif outputs - one on the pci card and an optical output on the dock.

 

[jhenderson010759]

The Lynx AES-16 looks perfect. Thanks.

 

[thomaspf]

Hi Edwood,

are you sure the RME card supports S/PDIF on all 3 optical ports. I was looking into that a while back and it appeared as if it only supported ADAT on these optical ports.

This would be a pretty cool solution if you could just drive these ports in S/PDIF mode like a multichannel card and get all channels of a 5.1 system on digital outputs.

Do you know whether this will work with the NVIDIA audio drivers that come with Theatertek?

Cheers

Thomas

 

[Edwood]

Yeah, not sure about outputting multichannel 5.1 on the RME.

-Ed

 

[jhenderson010759]

...seems like it will work also. It has three SP/DIF outs via a four-pole mini-plug. The Creative drivers disable digital outputs when the 2ZS is performing Dolby decoding, but when used in conjunction with MatrixMixer, the board will be operating as a pass-thru six channel output card, which should be fine for my purposes.

The drivers appear to feature a bit-perfect mode which bypasses any up-sampler.

 

[jiiteepee]

Creative card models equipped with AUD_EXT connector:

Application circuit to connect

6 digital INs (3 stereo) and
8 OUTs (4 stereo)

at the AUD_EXT-Connector - http://electricstart.de/site/optical.htm

jiitee