200$ Surround Sound for PS4 + PC?

You should have bought a damn receiver. No offense but this was exactly what I thought was going to happen.

This doesn't have anything to do with pc not being plug and play but all with you buying the wrong equipment.

 

The optical IN on his HT system should be identical to the optical IN on an A/V receiver.

It's quite likely that it's the optical OUT on his PC. If the audio solution (soundcard or MB audio) doesn't support realtime encoding to Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (not many do) then he will be limited to Stereo output on anything that isn't already encoded with multichannel audio that the receiver can decode (basically only DVDs, BluRays, and some movies encoded on PC).

In other words, he won't get 5.1 channel audio from PC audio or games over S/PDIF.

One area where a receiver would have had an advantage is if he used HDMI out and his video card (discrete or onboard) supported 5.1 channel output over HDMI (not all do although almost all recent ones should). But then he has to use HDMI from receiver to his monitor for display or go through the sometimes obtuse way of enabling HDMI audio over an HDMI connection while still having his primary display driven by DVI/DP.

Or, if optical quality wasn't of paramount importance he could have used analog connections from PC to receiver to have 5.1 channel audio.

So, yes, a receiver would have been better. Unfortunately, that didn't fit into the reality of his budget. Not everyone can be blessed with either living in a country with affordable equipment or even a country with good availability of well paying jobs.

Regards,
SB

 

If he'd bought a receiver he could have just set the receiver as the default audio device and if his monitor isn't hdmi all he'd have to do is press ctrl + p and clone his monitor. Though there might be some way to have audio over hdmi even without outputting anything to hdmi.

Anyway that would also enable windows or the receiver to take care of the upmixing and Orans life would have been trouble free. On the audio front anyway

I know a receiver was out of his budget but especially if you are budget constrained you should make sure you buy equipment that does what you want to avoid having to spend money twice. The receiver would have served him trouble free for years, that would have been well worth saving some extra money for. Instead he decided to buy something quick knowing it wasn't the solution he needed.

Its Oranpelupa's money and he should of course spend it however he wants but if you ask for advice and the advice is to buy a receiver and for whatever reason you buy something else, then don't complain about windows or pc not being plug and play.

 

No you won't. The receiver and/or Windows will take care of that.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/...definition-sound-and-music-from-your-computer

If the above doesn't work you can use one of the many sound modes on a receiver to have it upmix stereo to whatever amount of speakers you have.

Though I don't see why you would want to upmix music that hasn't been recorded in 5.1 to begin with because it will just make it sound worse.

 

Thats why I said if you would have bought a receiver.

Just to double check I just checked on my own receiver and I can have music play in stereo or have the receiver upmix it to a variety of formats.

 

I hate how almost all motherboard audio can't encode Dolby Digital or DTS. My original Xbox could do this but my $1300 i7 gaming PC can't. AsRock is the only mobo maker who includes (and includes in the spec list) this on most of their midrange models as far as I can tell. Others either don't include it or include it but don't mention it anywhere on the spec list for the most part. One of the reasons I prefer them these days.

 

"Unofficial" Realtek driver can possibly enable it, all motherboard audio is able to do it but there is a small licensing fee.

 

All mobo audio hardware is certainly capable of it but like you said almost no mobo makers pay the licensing fee to enable it. I wonder what the fee is.

Unfortunately I have Via audio on my mobo so there's no way to hack it

 

I just read through the last three pages of audio grief. This is exactly why I recommend everyone should skip audio sound cards entirely on the PC and go with HDMI GPU Audio to a Receiver. I switched to that setup back when the AMD 4800 GPU was brand new and never had issues since.

I hope you figure out all your audio issues. I certainly don't miss that!

 

No; I don't have those issues.

 

BRiT's sound configurations won't help you...

I don't think you're getting the huge difference between using a TOSLINK (an optical medium to carry a S/PDIF connection) and HDMI for sound. The capabilities are completely different.
S-PDIF is a ~30 year-old standard originally designed for very high quality digital stereo signals (at the time, 24bit 96KHz), non-compressed.
During the mid 90s Dolby, DTS and the companies making the first DVD players figured they could use the same standard and same plugs to send a compressed and encoded and lossy signal (16bit/44KHz) with 6 channels between the DVD players and the audio receivers, in order to get 6 discrete channels. The original Dolby Digital uses up to 640Kbps while DTS used up to 1.4Mbps.

Again, for a 5.1 audio stream to travel through TOSLINK, it must be encoded through a lossy algorithm at the source (DVD player, PC, whatever) and decoded at the destination (A/V receiver). So either your source is already encoded or you have to encode it before sending it to the receiver, or all you'll possibly get is stereo. Again, this is a ~30 year-old standard so you can't really expect much more from it, as the bandwidth limit is somewhere in the 1.5Mbps (I think).

HDMI was developed in the early 2000s already with home theater systems in mind. The very first revision carries up to ~38Mbps for audio alone, which allows sending up to 8 uncompressed, un-encoded 24bit/196KHz channels between the source and the receiver. You don't have to encode anything prior, you just have to tell the driver there's a 5.1 setup on the other side and it does everything else for you. And then it'll work perfectly for games, movies, music or whatever you throw at it.

In conclusion: getting a sound setup that only takes an optical TOSLINK to use with the PC without knowing the above beforehand, wasn't the smartest thing to do.. There was a reason why everyone kept pushing for an A/V receiver that supported HDMI-in. It seems the PS4 does have the ability to encode everything to Dolby Digital beforehand, luckily.


That said, your only chance to get 5.1 in games out of your PC right now is to get a 3rd-party software that will encode everything that comes out of your optical out into Dolby Digital or DTS. The names are Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect. But even that depends on your sound codec IC. Is it from Realtek?

Another option is to buy a soundcard that does that for you. Asus has a small USB audio adapter called Xonar U1 that does Dolby Digital encoding for a TOSLINK output. You may find a used one for cheap.

 

You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between DD/DTS and lossless LPCM or whatever over HDMI for games. Actually I can't tell the difference in music either. Guess I'm not audiophile enough

 

Oh God(s), not the lossless argument again.

Modern "lossy" audio compression schemes are effectively impossible to discern unless -- quite literally -- you have a specific type of hearing disability that changes how the generally acceptable physio-acoustic model works for you. People who are professionals and paid to do this work are the same folks that cannot point out the differences.

I hosted a single-blind test on this very forum about five years ago with four different types of audio compression, multiple people on this forum participated. Nobody, not a single one, could point out the "lossiest" of the samples -- a shoddy 128kbps CBR file at that -- compared to others such as a 192kbps VBR and even a 320kbps/24bit Vorbis HQ file. In fact, more than one person picked the 128kkps file as their favorite of the bunch.

There are other such examples on the web if you take just a few minutes to research it at all. The end result is always the same: those who claim to be able to tell the difference, when put into a proper study, cannot tell the difference.

There are other reasons why SPDIF sucks though, primarily because of the limitations of getting surround sound audio "converted" into that channel format. In most cases, it ends up getting downmixed to stereo, which is irritating. My argument above is unrelated to why SPDIF sucks for surround sound reasons