Cs:s

[Chilly]

How does one go about configuring CS:S to use S/PDIF passthrough for 5.1 surround sound? I have an external decoder and want the pure digital signal to get sent to my amp and not get rendered to stereo then sent, anyone know how?

[Chilly]

OK - did some research and unless you own a mobo with nvidia nforce SoundStorm chipset doohickey then you cannot, at this moment in time get a digital AC3/DTS x.1 signal from a game to your amp for the amp to decode. As it stands nvidia dont make nforce soundstorm for pentium4 775 (correct me if im wrong, but i couldnt find one) so im stuck with using crummy analogue cables (which dont work anyway cos my mobo sucks hairy donkey) to get the full 5.1 signal accross from a game to my amp - sigh. Kinda hopes shit would have invented itself by now, it cant be that hard to do!

Never mind, ok onto next question...Does anyone know of a driver/piece of software that will upmix a stereo signal to a full 5.1 (no DSP, just copying the front two channels to the rears and centre and doing the LF bypass cos i dont have a sub) in AC3 or DTS so i can get music out of all of my uber speakers? cos 2 just aint enough man!!!

[Ch3tan]

Use analouge to your amps 6 channel input, it's what I do to get surround sound out of my games. Hl2 has some very nice bass. All you need is 3 3.5mm to 2 RCA cables.

As for soundstorm, there was some rumblings about nvidia reintroducing it for their new mobo's and maybe making a standalone solution -although it will probably be a long wait.

[Chilly]

yeah i know how to setup the analog, but analog<digital especially when its the piece of shit DAC on my motherboards sound chipset doing the converting, i bought a 24bit/96khz DAC soundcard for a reason dammit

[Ch3tan]

That post makes no sense?

You bought a good soundcard for a reason, yet your motherboard is doint the digital to analouge conversion?

huh?

Soundstorm is meant to be very CPU usage heavy, and the improvement in sound quality isnt going to be that huge.

[Chilly]

no - if i used the analog decode on my mother board itd be inferior in terms of sample rate and bit depth compared to my soudn card, which is a studio recoridng card so only has two sets of L+R phono connectors and a connection to a breakout box which has midi and SPDIF on it, so if i want 5.1 from a game i HAVE to use my crummy mobo to decode it to analogue

[Tom]

Considering the wealth of noise and generally poor connection quality of components in a modern computer, I very much doubt you'd hear the difference in a game. Besides, aren't HL2 audio files all 44.1KHz 16bit? Resampling the signal would make very little difference with such low-quality source material.

[Chilly]

Probably wouldnt hear it in a game, your right Tom, but still, I dont have a grands worth of audio system to have to use fucking 3 different cables to get sound from my coputer to my ears, i want 1 nice thin coax.