How do I set up optical surround sound on my mac mini?

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8 Nov 2007
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London and Florence, Italy
Hi all,

I have a funny situation where my mac no longer recognises my receiver as a surround sound device through the digital optical connection. It used to, it worked for about a year and a half, then suddenly stopped sending 5.1. 2.0 still worked (mp3s, avis), but trying to send 5.1 (mkvs) ended up with no sound whatsoever, on any app (VLC, Plex).

My equipment: 2009 Mac Mini running OS 10.6, Denon AVR-3082 amplifier, connected via optical link.

I tried a complete reinstall (as it had been a while), and I remember last time I set up 5.1 on my mac mini, it was some very involved process involving Perian and changing settings in the DVD player. I saw the default interface now supported setting up speaker configuration directly through the Audio/Midi setup utility, however this doesn't seem to work for me. When I select multi-channel audio output, all the options except "Stereo" are greyed out. I am using "Digital out" as the output device (only choice), and have tried 44.1 and 48kHz. My amplifier does not support HDMI audio input, which would be the simplest solution, so I am stuck using this optical solution.

On this clean install (not even any OS updates), 2.0 playback works (mp3 through VLC), and now 5.1 playback is mixed down to stereo by default. I have seen a number of guides online saying to use Perian, edit config files and so on, but they are all several years old so I presume somerthing has changed since.

Does anyone know how to get 5.1 output from my mac mini to my receiver, in the way it used to work for years until last week? Thanks in advance.
 
Nobody knows? :(

Has anybody got optical to work with any other receivers, maybe it's my receiver being funny?
 
Have you checked the settings in "Audio MIDI setup"? which is a program hidden away in the Applications/Utilities directory...

I send 7.1 to my receiver and mine borked when I first installed XMBC iirc, it altered a setting and would only send 2.0 stereo instead, until I changed it back within "Audio MIDI setup"
 
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