Dolby decoder with pure digital outs

[bloosquare]

Does anyone know of any way of getting pure digital outs for all channels decoded for, say less than $2000. The only preamp I have seen that does this is the meridian series. I would guess it would be possible to do this using a reasonably fast computer w/ digital i/o's and some clever programming but I was hoping for a hardware solution.

-best,
-avi

 

[buckyg4]

Just curious.. What is the advantage to this?

 

[MDS]

I really don't understand the question. Is the goal to decode a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal into 6 separate channels and then output each of the channels over a separate digital output for each channel? If that is the intent, then I have to agree with buckyg4 - what is the advantage?

 

[DaveOCP]

I dont get it either. Meridian kind of does their own thing, but I dont think there's a particular sonic advantage to it.

 

[bloosquare]

The main idea was to be able use a digital dsp to equalize the sound externally from the decoder. This is easy to do w/ 2 channel audio but as far as I can tell impossible for the surround channels. W/ 2 channel stereo its pretty simple to keep a pure digital path from the source out to a dac of your choice. W/ the surround channels any processing seems to require an extra A->D->A. This seems to me to limit the sound quality to the lesser of the DAC on decoder, the A->D dac and the final DAC. Somewhat more concretely, the fantastically priced deq 2496 has a very good digital processor but dacs that introduce artifacts. So it wouldn't work very well for the surround channels. The meridians are doing it because they have so called "digital speakers" which basically means they've moved the DAC to be internal to an active monitor. We could all do this trivially if there were decoders that some sort of digital out. I guess I'm just surprised that it doesn't exist since I would think that the channels are separated and digital somewhere in every dolby decoder so the lack of digital outs seems like conscious decision rather than one of ability.

-best
-avi

 

[buckyg4]

I still don't see what the advantage is.. So you would go from a digital source, splitting the digital signal and sending it to a DAC? All this for a higher quality surround signal? Why not spend the money for a good pre/pro?

 

[bloosquare]

I still don't see what the advantage is.. So you would go from a digital source, splitting the digital signal and sending it to a DAC? All this for a higher quality surround signal? Why not spend the money for a good pre/pro?

Thats the idea, a preprocessor w/ digital outputs rather than a preprocessor w/ analogue outs. The idea is not to send the digital signal directly to a DAC but to be able to do what I want w/ it aka room equalize the speakers manually using a 1/3 octave equalizer before I send it to the DAC and w/out
having the extra A->D->A step stuck in the middle of it which requires a lot of expensive DACS to do right.

-avi

 

[9f9c7z]

In the studio, each ch is digi recorded, manipulated, then braided together and written to disc. What you want to do is the same thing backward; read from disc, then unbraid the signal so you have each ch available in digi format. Pro studio gear. Closest to the home markt that I know of might be a combo of Lynx Studio stuff; a sound card (LynxTWO) and processor (AES or Aurora???). If it will work (don't know for sure) you are lookind at around $3k, and your tweaking of individual ch's would be done in a pc.

Btw, welcome to the board.

 

[bloosqr]

In the studio, each ch is digi recorded, manipulated, then braided together and written to disc. What you want to do is the same thing backward; read from disc, then unbraid the signal so you have each ch available in digi format. Pro studio gear. Closest to the home markt that I know of might be a combo of Lynx Studio stuff; a sound card (LynxTWO) and processor (AES or Aurora???). If it will work (don't know for sure) you are lookind at around $3k, and your tweaking of individual ch's would be done in a pc.

Btw, welcome to the board.

Thats the impression I get as well. Wohler makes a decoder that does this explicitly in the hardware, it seems a bit expensive. (actually I have no idea how much but when they don't have prices it normally means I can't afford it ) I know enough about software where I could imagine hacking together a software solution by using a dolby decoder but rerouting the output before it goes to the analog out to digital outs on the machine. But some of that depends on what the decoder does i.e. it would be trivial if the decoder decodes to a standard bitsream format which then goes to standard dacs, however it would be a mess if it decodes to custom dolby dacs. What would be awesome would be if the dolby decoder chip does decode to standard bitstream, then just rip apart a cheap receiver/preamp and throw in a few toslink or aes/ebu chips. I'm really not enough of a hardware guru to do that but it would be fun to try

Thanks for the welcome!

-avi