AC3 Passthrough

[anything I don't mind]

What would be the best AV Receiver to connect to a PC as source, I currently have an ESI maya 44 and use the digital out going in to an old onkyo tx-ds595. But i want to use ac3filter and do the ac3 pass through. The ESI maya 44 only sends pcm over the optical cable. My current AV Receiver does have DTS and Dolby digital support from dvd and tv source (it only gets enabled when the source is detected, which i think is even how the latest av receivers will function). But do you know if it would support ac3 pass through on the optical with a new soundcard. I was looking at getting esi prodigy xfi nrg from esi as it says on their site that it supports ac3 pass through. That sound card would hopefully send a DTS or Dolby digital source. So the question is, would any modern day receiver for £200+ support the ac3 pass through and would my current AV Receiver be able to work with the esi prodigy xfi nrg ? If anyone has experience with AC3 pass through and can recommend a specific av receiver or sound card and please offer some insight in to it. Would you recommend just using HDMI ?

I was under the impression that if you have an ac3 file and i use ac3filter can select ac3 passthrough, it can actually send the raw data to the receiver. i know there are sound cards like the ht omega that can encode any audio in to dolby signal etc.

 

[csmager]

So you've got an AV reciever that supports AC3 and DTS, but you want a new one to do exactly that?

And you want a new soundcard specifically to support AC3 output over SPDI/F? Nearly every vaguely modern bit of onboard sound tat will support it, so I wouldn't go spending money. A quick google of your ESI card would indicate that it does too.

http://www.esi-audio.com/products/maya44/

MAYA44 provides 2 stereo analog line inputs, 2 stereo line outputs, a microphone input with +48V phantom power as well as an optical and coaxial S/PDIF output that can be used to pass through AC3/DTS signals

 

[anything I don't mind]

oh, when i try the ac3 passthrough i just get static. I never saw that on the specification of my card and i have read it many times.

Ok i just got it working, you were right, but look at this picture it still shows the same sort of static that i was hearing before. So it is still creating static on the one channel, which i don't think is ideal, i will contact esi about it. They use that channel as an spdif channel 3/4 in windows 7, maybe that is why it has static.