Emulating Surround Sound

Qion

Qion

Uber Nothing
Hello all- As you may have noticed in my signature, I have a 6.1 surround system hooked up to my eMac- via a two-way 3.5mm headphone jack splicer. This system sounds great just the way it is, but I really want to be able to use it to it's full potential. Do any of you know of a posible "surround sound emulator" that could change the regular headphone-quality(2 channel I think it is) sound into full 6.1 channel audio? I really don't want to have to resort to using an external sound card, so I would really like to find a piece of software that would do the same.

All replys appreciated.
 
Qion, are you saying that at the moment only two speakers are 'active'? are there 4 dormant speakers i mean? the 3.5mm jack is analogue, and as such will only ever be able to output 2 channels(thats what the little black bands are around the jack - they seperate the two channels). my surround system emulates the surround channels externally (its a sony dvd-surround sytem hooked up to my mac via 2-channel minijack to phono leads), and works out the surround channels from the sound coming out of the 2-channel audio from the mac.

also on a similar topic, on my pMac g5, the 3.5mm jack outputs 2-channel into my 5.1 decoder (using prologicII). if i hooked it through the optical, would it use full dolby digital 5.1 decoding?

at the moment it is emulating, whereas i want it to use it properly. does macos support 5.1 digital audio, or is it all emulation (prologic et al)?
 
To clarify, my surround system has 3 different input jacks to plug into what SHOULD be plugged into a sound card. I have a 2-way SPLICER connected to the one headphone jack. There is a switch on the speakers themselves that allows them to all play, even though there are only two input jacks connected. So, total, I have 6 speakers running plus one sub.
 
When you guys talk about emulating surround sound, are you talking about just getting all 6 speakers to make noise, or actually getting them to produce a surround effect?
 
no, satcomer, again, that is only emulating. dolby virtual surround takes the two channel output of your computer and creates a surround-like effect.
that's what i've got at the moment, which works fine.

what i want is for the DVD 5.1 encoding (6 channels of seperately encoded sound) to be decoded and sent to each speaker individually, not compressed in to two channels and sort-of expanded to sound 'like' 6 channels
 
Good Day All,
Lt Major Burns - my reading of the info on the product linked to previously suggests that it supports true 5.1 output. I suspect it would suit Qion's needs...but given that he does not want additional hardware he will be kind of outta luck. In order to get multi channel playback of audio from 2 channels the audio must be previously encoded using some scheme and then (of course) decoded and sent to the speakers. As mentioned before, Macs with optical/coax outputs can send digital signal to an outboard decoder which will reproduce true 5.1 or 6.1 audio. If your Mac only has a "headphone jack" as an ouput source than the best you can do without additional hardware is stereo. Anything else i.e. mult-ing the audio output to multiple speakers is not quite the intended result. Dolby Virtual Speaker is a technology designed to present a surround like experience using two speakers. http://www.dolby.com/consumer/technology/virtual_speaker.html.
I am sure much of this is redundent.
Best Regards
Andy Potvin
Film Applications Engineer
Dolby Laboratories Inc.
 
just as a last note, does anybody have any specs saying that the optical out in the powermac g5 is fully multichannel supportive? just so i know if it's worth buying optical cables....
 
Thanks for all the relplies.

Looks like I'm pretty much out of luck with getting "true" SS out of pure software emulation, but there does seem to be a lot of good products out there that externally make this possible. Maybe I'll just bite the bullet and get one.....
 
you could also get an external soundblaster like this one:
http://www.soundblaster.com/products/extigy/

it's usb, so is completly data-based and will give you the ability to reproduce full digital decoding fgor your speakers, unlockingh their full potential. as for me, it looks like i could indeed use an optical cable.

does anyone know of any imparticular cheap places for these? or is it best just to try dabs/simply etc
 
also, sorry for being lazy, but at least it's a thread now that can be used for future reference to anybody who may have the same questions :p
 
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