Hello there: I'm trying to play DVD-Audio discs on my HTPC with PowerDVD 8 ultra but I can't get 5.1 sound, I'm passing the audio via the s/pdf output of my audigy 2ZS to an onkyo tx-sr805 receiver, when I play movies I get the 5.1 sound but when I play DVD-audio I get only stereo sound. Somebody please help. Thank you.
maybe your dvd-audio isnt in 5.1, most likely its a 2.0/2.1 sound track, because your movies are coming out fine in 5.1.
Id recommend the creative media source player, i do also believe they have a dvd audio plugin or separate application for it
The media is 5.1 at least that's what PowerDVD says, even when I use the creative dvd-audio sample disc, that is 5.1, I have the same results. I'll give it a try.
Try foobar and go to prefs > output - dsp and add the upmix stero to 4 channels to the active list. Should add sound to the rear set, but I doubt the actual media on the dvd is 5.1.
DVD-Audio can't be passed in 5.1 over S/PDIF. You'll need to hook up the multichannel analog output to get anymore than two channel. Also due to down sampling issues you should use the creative player, but you will not get any sound out of a digital output, for copy control reasons digital output is disabled in creative's dvd-a player. If you want the best sound possible out of DVD-A discs you should use a program called DVDAexplorer to rip them to six channel wavs or flac. Then you can play them back in the latest version of foobar. This avoids the nasty downsampling of PDVD and the sloppyness of creative's player.
^ Well said. Also, your soundcard comes with DVD-A software on the installation CD. If you don't want to hook up with analogs, you can always just select the normal Dolby Digital or DTS track off your DVD-As instead of the MLP lossless track.
Thank you guys for your help, I just wanted to know why I wasn't getting 5.1 sound from DVD-A, I thought it was a problem with my soundcard drivers or something like that, but now I know it's a copy control thing Definitely I'm gonna go with the analog hookup, not just to get DVD-A 5.1 but also get dolby True HD and DTS HD from blu ray and HDDVD discs.
It's copy control that you get no sound over digital in creative's player. The reason you can't get 5.1 over digital is that spdif doesn't have enough bandwidth to pass 6 channels of uncompressed audio.
most creative cards do not output anything but stereo on the spdif line. only way to do that is to use the analog outputs or get a soundcard better suited to your needs (ala auzentech) i beleive you also need to be using creative mediasource to play dvd audio in 5.1.
Even on a card with DD Live/DTS Connect (Auzentech XFI, Asus Xonar, etc) you would want to use analog output for sources like DVD-Audio or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. On SPDIF with DDLive you are compressing the signal to lossy 16 bit 48000khz. With analog you can decode the lossless 24bit 96000hz audio. The quality difference is significant if you have good speakers. Also the DACs in most good sound cards are better than the DACs in most low-mid range receivers.
The Audigy2 ZS is capable of 5.1 , just make sure that your speaker Surround Mixer setup is set for 5.1 and your soundcard should be able to decode and give you 5.1 through your speaker system, provided you have 5 speakers . If the DVD software player says it is 5.1 capable than it should be, but if not than check for an update . You can only get 5.1 sound if your soundcard supports it and if it does than there should be a speaker setup program (Surround Mixer) and a speaker hookup program (Speaker Settings). These programs come included in the Creative Labs Audigy2 ZS series of soundcards but they must be installed by the pc user otherwise the soundcard defaults to a two-speaker or 2.1 setup and can only be changed AFTER you have hooked-up your 5.1 speakers and connected the appropriate speaker wires to the back of your soundcard. I hope this helps...good luck
not 100% true. if you have a source that is already encoded in dolby or dts, creative cards can pass that through unmodified to a receiver.
You can have hardware decoding (HDMI has encoded digital and audio built-in) .My Monitor is HDMI compatible and has the necessary S-video and v/audio dongle included to hook-up to a HDMI receiver...why would you need to pass-thru the soundcard, just go directly to the receiver.
