Surround passthrough

rG-tom

rG-tom

rG-tom

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Hey guys,

If i dont fix this soon I'm REALLY going to go insane.

I have an Asus AT3ION-T based HTPC (nVidia ION with a dual core atom etc). I cannot get it to output surround sound. It was working with XBMC live, then one day it just stopped passing dts over, only stereo. Installed windows 7, all the drivers, stereo working fine.....dts/ac3 wasnt. Hooked up an SPDIF cable....still no joy.

Ive since bought THIS, installed the latest creative drivers....STILL ONLY STEREO!!!! When I tell the software to force to spdif, my amp just says no input. I've tried in VLC, media player classic and XBMC for pc.

The amp is a denon avr-4306 and it is working fine with every other device I have, even if i plug it in at the end of the same hdmi cable, so I can't see it being an amp setting.

Please help as I cant think what else I can do!

Regards,

Tom.
 
Use Cyberlink's PowerDVD software with DTS® and Dolby Digital®-EX decoding and set it to pass audio over S/PDIF.. as a test ..


Also you can try media player classic home cinema..


http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/


Again set it to pass audio over S/PDIF.


Remember the content you are trying to play must have DTS or Dolby Digital audio track for it to work in 5.1.



What software player are you using to try pass 5.1 audio to the amp ? Also check your sound card drivers and what sample rate they are doing over the digital 48Khz or 96KHz.. Some amps don't like 48Khz or 96KHz... try changing between them too.
 
Last edited:
The content is 1080p mkv files, definitely have 5.1 dts.

I've tried media player classic home cinema.

The amp can play 48 + 96khz content. Its a devon avr-4306, a 1600 quid amp!

Cheers for the ideas

Tom
 
Stupid question but you've definitely got the passthrough option enabled in XBMC for sound? I don't know if under Linux any sound cards can encode DTS on the fly but DTS passthrough would definitely work.

Does your amp indicate if it's receiving PCM, DTS or DD?
 
It is normal dts, and yes it is set to passthrough :/ could it being x64 windows 7 be causing any issues? It says pcm for stereo and then shows nothing when I tell it to pass through.
 
I use x64 7 and no issues here. Is there any chance you could upload a sample of something that I can take a look at? Based on the fact the amp is receiving PCM rather than DTS the issue has to be PC side (you probably figured that already but I wanted to eliminate it), at this point I'm not sure what to suggest but maybe by taking a look on a completely different system (I.E. mine or another readers) we might be able to gleam something useful.
 
Ill see what I can sort out when I get back to my pc. It's worth noting that the same files were working on this system perfectly under xbmc live until it broke randomly!
 
well, ok....we have a success story here!

I have another AV receiver (a marantz) in the office room that doesnt have HDMI, only optical, so i took the htpc into there, plugged it in, fired it up and bang straight away a DTS symbol came up when i started playing a film.

Bizarre i thought, maybe my Denon doesnt like trying to decode dts from optical when the display is from HDMI? So i thought ill remove the hdmi binding from that channel, leave the optical on it, and plug an analogue monitor into the HTPC. Same problem. Change the optical binding to another channel (it was originally set to DVD, moved it to VDP) and hey presto, instant fix......

uninstalled the soundcard ive just bought and installed today, re-enabled the hdmi sound in the bios, booted back into windows.....hey presto, also perfectly working dts.

To make things stranger, the western digital WDTV that i have, works perfectly, with DTS, on the DVD channel, so why on earth does the HTPC not but it does on the VDP channel?

Now to research if there is a factory reset option on the amp that I can't find, as either something has gone very strangely wrong with it or a setting has been knocked on the DVD channel.....

Thanks for all your help guys, it's a bizarre problem that has been ****ing me off for 2 months now, and i really thought it was a problem with the motherboard!

Tom.
 
ok, before doing a factory reset i thought id try and re-assign hdmi1 back to dvd.

Guess what.

IT ****ING WORKS. WTF kind of problem was that! Months of playing, buying a new soundcard etc all for a problem that was fixed by moving HDMI1 assignment from DVD to VDP and back again. Brilliant.
 
Haha got to love windows at times..... Almost like when windows decided to switch back to power saving energy profile and sent my computer to sleep while I was sleeping which gave me a nasty shock when I woke up!

To top it off my sound was then scrambled took me ages to sort it turned out I had to uncheck and recheck the DDL encoding box lol :rolleyes:
 
nothing to do with windows mate, im talking about my amp! assigning the hdmi1 etc is on my Denon AVR-4306
 
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