Digital Surround Sound and PC Games

TheGreySpectre

TheGreySpectre

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2005
Messages
439
So I have my PC plugged into a Receiver (Onkyo SR506) via fiber optic cable from the standard motherboard integrated sound card. My question is why games don't support surround sound over this connection. I understand that some PC games don't have digital encoding for surround sound, but what about the Dolby Digital games? Games like Modern Warfare 2 and Mass Effect support dolby digital surround sound on other platforms such as xbox360 and ps3, do the same games just not have dolby digital support on PC?

What makes game surround different from DVD/Blu-ray surround sound so that my receiver can do surround sound from Movies played on my computer but not games?

I suppose it's also possible I just have some setting horribly wrong in all my games, but when I select surround sound I do not get surround sound.
 
Most receivers can only understand certain formats, PCM (raw uncompresed audio), Dolby Digital, DTS, and the lossless versions of these formats. The optical cable only has the bandwidth to do stereo PCM. HDMI on the other hand has lots of bandwidth and can do surround sound with PCM, so if you connect your PC through HDMI to your receiver your games would be in surround sound. To get surround sound over optical the audio needs to be compressed in a format like DD or DTS. So your game audio would need to be transcoded into DD or DTS. You need a sound card that supports this technology like Dolby Digital Live.

Also if your receiver has analog surround sound inputs you can use those to get surround sound from your PC.
 
i think with pc's, your sound card (or integrated sound) needs to support dolby digital live. ddl should take any 5.1 and convert it to dolby 5.1 so that your receiver will recognize it as 5.1

i haven't been able to fully test it, i do have a 2.1 sony dvd audio system which can decode 5.1 (it just shoots it out as a virtual surround). and when i have my pc hooked up to it with the digital out (i set 5.1 as the output on my soundcard), the indicator on the audio system shows multi-channel

(oh, just noticed that he poster above me mentioned dolby digital live, well i'll post anyway to add to opinion :))
 
Majinhoju said:
i think with pc's, your sound card (or integrated sound) needs to support dolby digital live.
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This guy has it right.

To send 5.1 over optical you need a sound card that supports Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect. Current Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi cards do this and probably other recent cards but I haven't looked at sound cards in a long time so I don't know which ones. If you go shopping for a sound card to do this, Dolby Digital Live should be advertised as a feature in the specs list.

The only onboard sound that supported DDL was nForce2 Soundstorm, I think.

You'll need to use analog connections to get surround without Dolby Digital Live.

Also, I have no idea why some games advertise Dolby Digital on PC.
 
djoye said:
Also, I have no idea why some games advertise Dolby Digital on PC.
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That is a good question.. Some big time false advertising.

You can even check game folders.. I don't see any ac3 files :O
 
In all honesty I have never checked to see if the PC versions support dolby digital. But if they don't the question arises of why not when the console version does? You would think that with space being at more of a premium with consoles (at least the 360) if anything the PC would include it and the console wouldn't.

So if I were to connect via HDMI then I should be able to get surround sound without a separate sound card? Good to know although unfortunately my current reciever only acts as an HDMI hub with passthrough instead of supporting sound via HDMI >.<
 
I had the same problem as the OP until I bought the Auzentech X-Fi Forte. With that card you can output in DTS or Dolby Digital live. I believe the Asus Xonar and some creative cards will do the same.
 
Surround is cool and all,but....

My experience has led me to believe that stereo is the best digital format for PC.

When you ask the pc to produce surround via DTS, it just sounds souless imo. Compressed.

Now I have done some fairly funky stuff but now I am happy w 2 really good speakers and a fast sub off of a really good receiver optical out of my x-fi. I would prefer a sound card with coax out but like many others, I am poorer now than I was 3 years ago.
 
Ruoh said:
Say what? I guess I was stroking out when I had DD/DTS 5.1 setup via optical out on my old Sony ES setup.
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Optical only does stereo in lossless quality . It does DD/DTS 5.1 which is highly compressed audio.
 
spaceman said:
Surround is cool and all,but....

My experience has led me to believe that stereo is the best digital format for PC.

When you ask the pc to produce surround via DTS, it just sounds souless imo. Compressed.

Now I have done some fairly funky stuff but now I am happy w 2 really good speakers and a fast sub off of a really good receiver optical out of my x-fi. I would prefer a sound card with coax out but like many others, I am poorer now than I was 3 years ago.
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Audio is usually best in its native format, and for PC games that almost never Dolby Digital. For games, PC surround sound formats like EAX convert sound effects to Dolby pretty well, they get depth of field pretty well, but it hurts the musical score and voice and other proper stereo/mono tracks.
I had the PC connected up to 5.1 surround with a DDL sound card when it was all together in a small apartment, but with the PC in its own home office type room now, like you say I get 95% of the same with a good set of floor speakers and a simple stereo receiver.
 
For games that are ONLY 5.1, usually console ports, I change my X-Fi to use Dolby Digital Live so that it sends the 'surround' channels to my side speakers.

I use DDL because DTS Connect seems to output a much lower LFE (bass) channel. I think DTS has a higher bitrate than Dolby Digital but I still just use DDL since the LFE channel is louder.

Sounds like you guys may have had a poor experience with surround if you're not experiencing full-sounding sound. Setting up surround really takes some (a little) configuring if you want it to sound good; you can't just toss some skimpy cube speakers around the room and be wow'ed. You're going to need some decent surround speakers, not little cubes or skimpy bookshelf speakers, if you want full-sounding surround to go with your full-sounding front and you'll also need a good subwoofer.

Most computer-centric surround packages are skimpy and don't provide much range so don't expect much from those. A good route is to blow a bunch of money on a receiver that has at least 7.1 analog input and speakers; even inexpensive average speakers are fine. My PC surround speakers consists of some Sony speakers front and rear and Onkyo side speakers and a Dayton sub, heh. By no means awesome but it has some guts.
 
It's not that my speakers sound crappy, while not overly fantastic they arn't terrible. I have an actual home theater amp and nice polk powered sub. It sounds pretty good for movies and blu-rays. The problem is that I only get stereo sound on games (or upmixed stereo via Pro logic 2) instead of actual 5.1. My reciever (an Onkyo Sr506 was from the earlier days of HDMI when low end receivers did not have full HDMI support.

If I upgrade my reciever to one with HDMI audio support and give sound to the receiver via HDMI will that give me surround sound in games or will I need a new receiver and a sound card with DDL?
 
My personal set up is with a Asus Xonar D2X sound card with a Coax output to my receiver, I basically set DTS output in the sound card settings, select 5.1 and then set my receiver to use DTS on the Coax in and boom, works well.

The sound card drivers have a "GX" mode which is responsible for dealing with stuff like EAX effects in Vista/Win7, translating that into the right output, I think EAX is owned by creative, it can handle perfect translation up to something like EAX 2.0 and everything above is approximated I think. It seems to work OK for the most part, i've played hundreds of games and only problems with FarCry2 and Plants Vs Zombies
 
TheGreySpectre said:
It's not that my speakers sound crappy, while not overly fantastic they arn't terrible. I have an actual home theater amp and nice polk powered sub. It sounds pretty good for movies and blu-rays. The problem is that I only get stereo sound on games (or upmixed stereo via Pro logic 2) instead of actual 5.1. My reciever (an Onkyo Sr506 was from the earlier days of HDMI when low end receivers did not have full HDMI support.

If I upgrade my reciever to one with HDMI audio support and give sound to the receiver via HDMI will that give me surround sound in games or will I need a new receiver and a sound card with DDL?
Click to expand...
What kind of sound interface do you have? Onboard or a sound card? If your PC has 7.1 sound you can EASILY use it with that receiver. That receiver has direct 7.1 channel inputs on the back.

Buy FOUR of these ($0.73 each):
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...d=10218&cs_id=1021804&p_id=665&seq=1&format=2

The 3.5mm end goes in your sound card (or onboard sound) and the red and white ends go to your receiver in the area marked for multi-channel or direct input.

Use this for the color scheme:
http://www.hobby-hour.com/electronics/sound-card-color-code.php

You'll be dealing with green (fronts), gray (side), orange (sub/center), and black (back) on your PC. On the back of your receiver, above the "DVD" inputs you'll see FRONT, SURR, CENTER/SUBWOOFER, SURR BACK. So basically (PC -> RECEIVER): green -> FRONT, gray -> SURR, orange -> CENTER/SUB, black -> SURR BACK. It should be all whites on the top row and all reds on the bottom row. Once you have all that connected, hit the MULTI CH button on your receiver and you should get sound from your PC. You might have to set Windows or your sound card software to 7.1, then test to make sure you have sound from all speakers.

This will send discrete surround to your receiver without the need of HDMI or optical with Dolby Digital.
 
Onboard sound, but I think it might still support 7.1 even if it doesn't I know it supports 5.1 which is all that matters since I only have 5.1 sound in the first place. Thanks guys.
 
jonneymendoza said:
what about for playing hd content(mkv files)? same issues has games? has to have DDL?
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If you have .mkv file with the audio stream encoded using DTS or AC3, then you don't need any additional DDL encoders. Most players will pass the unmodified stream directly thru S/PDIF to the receiver and the receiver will be able to decode and split the stream into 5.1 audio channels.
 
I'd honestly guess that they aren't supporting DD and DTS because so few people have their system hooked up to a receiver for decoding it. Why not just use 5.1 or 7.1 PCM as set up in Windows? That way the people that are using the pre-fab multi-channel speaker combos can use it as well. I don't think DD or DTS would offer advantages over this.
My current set-up is to just use the HDMI function on my video card, but on an X-Fi or older Creative cards you can run the analog multi-out and do just fine. If you don't have a multi-in on your receiver, you'll definitely want a sound card that can do DD Live...which handles everything in a similar manner, only with it's own encoder.
To my knowledge, an optical out will only handle non-encoded multi-channel audio up to 2.1.
 
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