Unregistered said:
My audio system has Dolby surround Pro Logic with a main left and right speaker, center speaker, left and right surround sound speakers and a sub woofer so I am guessing that means I also have 5.1. The problem is people on the forums I have been looking at does not no for sure if the converter I purchased to connect the two equipments will support the 5.1 dolby surround pro logic sound that my audio system has. The question i have is while watching a dvd for example, how will I know if the converter box is supporting the above surround sound that I mentioned. What will I notice differently from hearing my audio system working correctly with the functions it is capable of and how will i notice if the converter is not supporting the 5.1 dolby surround pro logic sound.
That Radio Shack converter will work just fine when you have one type of digital audio connection (eg. optical) and need the other (eg. coaxial). However, based on your description you can't use it. If your receiver only has Dolby Prologic and not Dolby Digital then it likely doesn't have either coaxial or optical digital inputs.
You can still connect a dvd player or cd player to that receiver and get 5.1 Surround - just not Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround. You connect cd/dvd to the receiver using analog cables (as you probably already have done if you are listening to music). The receiver takes the 2-channel analog signal and applies the Prologic algorithm to it to turn it into 5.1. If you play a DVD that is encoded in Dolby Digital, the DVD player will down-mix it to 2-channel analog and send it to the receiver over the analog cables. So yes, you will hear 5.1 Surround, but again it is not Dolby Digital 5.1. If your receiver DOES have a digital input, but does not support Dolby Digital decoding, then you can use the optical or coax digital cables and that RS converter to connect the cd/dvd player to the receiver, but again you will not get DD 5.1. In that case, you have to set the dvd player to output PCM (NOT Bitstream) and the dvd player will down-mix the DD stream to 2-channel PCM, perform Digital to Analog conversion and send the analog signal out the analog audio jacks.
Whether or not you can hear the difference between analog audio converted to multiple channels and Dolby Digital is purely subjective and depends on your ears. In many cases, I think DD does sound better than Prologic due to more precise steering of sounds (The DD bitstream specifically places sounds where the engineer intended as opposed to Prologic which converts a signal with no embedded surround info into multiple channels and thus guesses, although pretty accurately, to which speaker a sound should be sent).
