Thread: Ultra Cheap Optical Input Amp

Originally Posted by tripzero

^^^This.

Personally, I'd prefer a 4-channel amp with 2 stereo SPDIF DAC's in it. I have NO need to be forced to encode to AC3 just to get it to the AMP.

time to start an amp company

Originally Posted by CraziFuzzy

Personally, I'd prefer a 4-channel amp with 2 stereo SPDIF DAC's in it. I have NO need to be forced to encode to AC3 just to get it to the AMP.

good point-- unless the card supports internal routing.

Originally Posted by CraziFuzzy

Personally, I'd prefer a 4-channel amp with 2 stereo SPDIF DAC's in it. I have NO need to be forced to encode to AC3 just to get it to the AMP.

I missed where it only accepts AC3. Having a particular output format requirement seems dumb, to me.

For audio over USB the audio stream gets encoded into AC-3 to be sent over the USB connection.

I am faily sure that their reference design would not support this, but it would be a nice surprise.

The older reference design that's on their website does have two optical and one coax SPDIF ports. The newer one in the video appears to only have one optical and one coax.

Originally Posted by SenatorIvy

I missed where it only accepts AC3. Having a particular output format requirement seems dumb, to me.

The only way to get more than 2 channels over an SPDIF connection is via a lossy compressed stream (AC3 or DTS). Personally, I'd rather use a card with discrete digital outs (pretty much anything from Creative) feeding an amp with discrete digital in's. If you DO have a surround sound source, you can just as easily do the AC3 decoding on the PC, and still send discretes to the amp(s).

Lossy is all relative....even in a sound studio there are very very few people that can tell AC3 from uncompressed PCM (if any).

True, but that doesn't mean there's a real reason to NOT use discrete for local interconnect.