Squeezebox and DTS, Dolby Digital Wav Files?

[captain_tinker]

Hello folks,

I know that this is probably going to be a stupid question, but I figured I would ask it anyway, as the only stupid question is really the one that is not asked.

When you have a SB hooked up to a receiver via the coax digital cable, and if you try and play a DTS or DD encoded wav file, will it be passed as bitstream to the receiver and play as a DTS or DD or will it be passed as PCM and just get static? I tried something from my laptop today, as it has a coax out on it. I played a DTS and a DD encoded wav via SoftSqueeze, and got nothing but static.

I am wondering about this because I have a few DTS music cd's that I have ripped in the past to wav, and they played back as DTS after I burned them to CD audio again, so I know that they will play as DTS, but I don't know if it will work over a Squeezebox. Has anyone ever tried this? Does it work?

-capT

 

[JonFo]

Aye Captain,

The question is valid, as this is the 'torture test' of digital bitstreams.
If a device can correctly pass a 16/44.1 bitstream with DTS data encoded (from the rip of a DTS CD), you are guaranteed there is no funky resampling or bit depth changes.

Unfortunately, most PC's fail miserably at this, and is one of the reasons most audio out's from a PC sound 'bad'.

The kmixer function in windows (this takes the PCM from the audio player and the Windows event sounds and mixes them) generally runs at 48Khz sampling rates. So the 44.1 audio data is upsampled to 48 and fed out the digital output as 16/48. Of course, the DTS decoder looks at that stream and can't recognize it and all you get is static.

Certain audio cards (m-Audio and others) are able to pass bit-perfect audio streams. There are several threads on the board about those (search for m-audio).

As for the Squeezebox, yes, it supports DTS passthrough: http://forums.slimdevices.com/archive/index.php/t-13820.html

 

[captain_tinker]

JonFo,
Thank you!!! That was very well explained, and certainly makes sense.

-capT