Connecting a PC to Your Home Theater

[jaxvon]

The green output is analog and you would get nasty digital sound if you hooked that up.

Oops, that's some misinformation. What I MEANT to say is that if you hooked the digital output to one of your analog input you would get nasty digital sound. If you connected the analog output to your digital input, you would just get nothing, except maybe a confused receiver.

 

[dollylama]

Would yall mind backing up and giving me some basic info? I'm helping someone digitize their CD collection onto their computer. They've got a relatively "smart" house, and while I'm not a stereo buff, I know they've invested a lot into thier system.

My question has two parts. First, if the pc is on the 3rd floor, connected to a second floor "IT closet" by means of CatV cable, and the stereo is on the first floor near another CatV port, is this a viable layout for bringing the music to the stereo? Secondly, what are the key pieces involved? Is a direct connect from the pc to the stereo by something other than CatV cable required?

I'm also particulary interested in the options for controlling and searching the digital library from a remote or hand held device. A guy at Tweeters gave me 2 options: a $1,000 Universal Remote Control that would come with an additional $500 programming fee and would require the tv to be on, and the $6,500 Crestron portable device that sounds fantastic, but is it worth the price?

Is there anywhere in between?

Lama

 

[ironlung]

Do any of you use your PC as a DVD-A player through the multi channel analog output to your HT setup? What results have you obtained?

 

[jaxvon]

Dolly:

There are a few options. One is a Squeezebox, which was recently reviewed here at [http://www.audioholics.com/productreviews/avhardware/SlimDevicesSqueezebox2p1.php]Audioholics[/url]. Next up might be the option of a Sonos system. It was also reviewed here recently. Check it out.

Crestron stuff is sweet, but I don't think for your purposes that it would be worth it to drop $6500 on it.

Ironlung: I don't know of anyone playing DVD-A on their computer and outputting the sound through the Analog outs. Computer sound cards have very noisy analog connections. If you want to output sound from your computer, I'd recommend using a digital connection as I did to another poster earlier in the thread. But, if you want to play some DVD-A discs, a decent univeral player like the Pioneer DV-578A is only a little more than $100 shipped from a reputable dealer, so that's always a viable option.

 

[ironlung]

Wow!

I am looking at the sound blaster audigy 2/4 specs they seem pretty good 108 dB SNR, A-weighted THD .004% (@1kHz), 192dB dynamic range, THX cert.

Seems pretty good.

No one has hooked this puppy up to a competent HT setup.

I wonder if it could pass DVD-A via IEEE-1394.

 

[jaxvon]

I think you might be able to do DVD-A through firewire, but I'm not sure. I know for a fact that you couldn't do SACD through IEEE 1394.

As far as specs, yes the card is great, but it doesn't have enough noise filtering in place to keep all the garbage out of the analog section. Note that Dillyo above is running an Audigy 2 Value, another card with great specs, and his audio was much better though the digital connection. YMMV.

 

[ironlung]

Anybody have real world experience?

Its hard to believe that the analog outs would be so noisy and still pass THX cert no? Maybe the previous poster has some ground issues. Certianly would be noise free if you could pass the multi channel with IEEE-1394.

 

[Latent]

The IEEE-1394 on the creative cards is only for pluging in digital cameras and other firewire devices. They have never done any audio over firewire as far as I know. Their latest card the X-Fi doesn't even have a IEEE-1394 port which shows you how little they use it.

Also the output of the Audigy cards is fine for 6Ch analog output. You shouldn't hear any white noise from them though your receiver unless you crank the volume on your receiver right up. If you have a problem its probably a faulty sound card or cable problems.

 

[Latent]

There are several reasons why digital options like this Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive are so appealing. The first is the obvious simplification in cabling and not using up your only multi channel in. However for a simple set up with no other multi channel input devices (DVD-Audio/SACD players) where your PC is a primary input device I think a couple of extra cables are a real big problem though.

But the big advantage of a multi channel digital connection from a PC would be using your receiver to do all the final digital processing. With the analog multi channel input on most receivers all processing is turned off except for individual channel trims. Some receivers convert it to digital first and then can do a limited set of processing though. With a signal in DD or DTS the receiver can do a lot more. Like full bass management, time delays, room correction etc.

There is one major problem with this live DD or DTS encoding and that is the loss of quality due to the compression of the sound into these formats. Also these live converters probably have lower quality than the ones used by a movie studio to produce a DVD. 6Ch analog out from a good sound card will probably still give you better quality sound in the end. So until someone makes something that encodes to 96khz/24bit 7.1 channel PCM over IEEE-1394 from a PC we won't be able to eat our cake and have it as well.