Surround sound?

zcus wrote on 2/6/2003, 8:28 AM

Do you need a special sound card to inhance this new feature or will any sound card do? For example my new motherboard comes with onboard 6 channel audio, so will I be able to preview in real time 5.1 surround from my computer or will this only happen on the final DVD through a set top player?

Thanks

Comments

lunar07 wrote on 2/6/2003, 8:34 AM

You should be able to preview 5.1 surround from your computer. For this refer to the sound card setup that allows you to choose number of speakers and how to connect the speakers. Or in case you have an SPDIF/Optical out with your sound card, connect this output to the digital input on a digital 5.1 receiver.

mikkie wrote on 2/6/2003, 10:01 AM

As far as I know you should be able to listen to your surround setup in Vegas 4. How much control you'll have over speaker routing depends on your soundcard (or in this case chipset) drivers - ie: if your setup uses the microsoft sound mapper, you'll have less control then someone using a higher end soundcard with ASIO driver support.

Outside of Vegas, listening to 5.1 depends on your hardware/software setup. The Dolby (TM) stuff normally requires hardware/software that's licesned the code, & I don't know if that came with your board or if you'd need a DVD player. If you encode your surround to a winmedia 9 file, then all you should need is wmplayer9 or possibly 7.1 updated with the codec pack.

mike

pwppch wrote on 2/6/2003, 10:43 AM

The requirement to monitor surround output is a driver that exposed 3 discreet audio output devices. We do not support encoding signals to digital output unless the hardware does this internally.

For example:
The Creative Audigy card does NOT expose 3 discreet stereo ports in Wave Classic Driver mode so you cannot rout to the different surround channels using the Wave Classic Drivers. The Audigy ASIO drivers do expose the Front/Rear and Center/LFE ports so you can route your surround master bus correctly.

Peter