Re: [LAU] surround sound with stereo usb DACs? - Linux-audio-user

14 Jan 2009

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Fons Adriaensen &lt;fons(a)kokkinizita.net&gt; wrote:
...
  On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:20:28AM +1100, Loki Davison
wrote:
  On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Bearcat M.
Şandor
 &lt;HomeTheater(a)feline-soul.com&gt; wrote: 
   I'm
slowly building a hi-fi surround system around Trends Audio products. They
 have a nice, little, stereo usb DAC. I am really only looking at wanting 4
 channels for now. I have something like 8 usb2 ports on this computer so i
 have plenty.
 Can i have my player (xine or mplayer or what have you)  decode the signal be
 it dolby digital, dts, or the blu-ray formats (ha) into channels and then send
 (right and left) out of one usb port and (right rear and left rear) out of a
 second usb port to a pair of these stereo DACs.  I assume if i eventually
 wanted an 8 channel system i could so the same thing with more channels? 
 Have you thought of buying a decent pci sound card? A PCI solution
 would mostly likely be better in almost every way.
 You can choose a level of price quality, and > 8 channel out is easy
 to find. My echo 3g does that fine, with no arseing around and i would
 suspect superior sound quality, if not put and DAC you like on the
 ADAT out... ;) 
 I'll second that. For any serious surround you want
 matched sample rates and delays, and I doubt very
 much if multiple 2-ch USB interfaces can provide that.
 Also the availability of DRM-ed format decoders on
 Linux could be problematic, but I'm not an expert
 on that matter.
 Ciao,
 --
 FA
 Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
 Parma, Italia
 O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
 E guerra e morte !

I think blu-ray playback works with mplayer/etc. It's just quite
annoying https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD
Not as annoying as getting multiple usb cards to work though ;) One
usb card is horrible enough. In my experience usb audio = evil.
PCI/firewire/pcmcia are all ok ;)
Loki