Toslink Sound

T

Tony123

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 3, 2004
Messages
112
I was told that I could use a toslink digital cable to transfer sound to my TV or an amp if I choose to get into heavy surround sound.

My question is Can you play video games with a digital sound cable?

I was told digital sound cables were meant for non-interactive stuff (like movies and TV)

All I want, in the end, is to have all my HT stuff in one HTPC and to have it all hooked up into 1 sound system

(I want my games, movies, and TV to come out of the same speakers)

how do I hook up all the sound?

thanks for reading
 
So Digital Sound cables can be used with video games huh?

So I just hook up the HTPC to an amp with toslink and after that everything would be using the amp (DVDs PVR TV PC GAMES ect.)?
 
I suggest not running consoles throught he PC at all if that's what you are working towards. Get a good Home Theater receiver to manage all that for you. Doesn't have to cost a fortune. $300 will get you a very good Pioneer 7.1 receiver. you can get a good HK for cheaper if you want to go refrub route.

once you have the receiver, you can run the digi audio out of the PC and consoles to the receiver.
 
I think the OP wanted to run his PC games to his receiver using digital, in which case you will need a card with 'dolby digital live' (DDL) encoding, there's only a couple of those cards available now, the Mystique, and a turtle beach one.

Using toslink with games on any other card will only send a stereo signal to your receiver. DVDs will pass the digital audio to your receiver in full surround though.
 
you're right, I just assumed console. for PC games, you will need DD encoding. my fault for misreading.
 
ENcoding. DD ENcoding. turtle beach makes one, some Nforce boards do it, and tere is another, but I can't remember.
 
It's nforce 2 boards that did this, no nforce 3 or 4 boards have this feature that I'm aware of.

The most popular one is the HDA X-Mystique, there's a huge thread about it in the computer audio forum. Very little is known about the turtle beach so far. Also, some high end Intel boards with a sepcial version of a realtek codec can (880D I think.)

Of course, all those cards don't have EAX 3 or 4 that the Audigy cards have, so CPU utilisation is a little higher.
 
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