Connecting Sony HT-M5 to PC

[matheusmello]

Hi people. I would like to know how to connect a Sony HT-M5 sound system to my computer to be able to play in 5.1 speaker configuration!

As far as I know my sound card have DTS Interactive techonogy. Do I still need Dolby Digital Live technology to play in 5.1? I have an ASUS Xonar DS sound card.

What type of connection should I use to interface boths devices?

Thank you!

 

[ssddx]

afaik the h5-m5 shows up as having hdmi inputs in addition to the optical.

you could always hook it up to your video card via hdmi and set it up as the default audio device if this is the case. if you had hdmi passthrough on it to your monitor, that would work. or, if you do not want passthrough it would just appear as a second monitor but not actually draw any resources as no image would get displayed (or processed to get displayed) and only sound would be output.

as for optical... you can only get stereo sound uncompressed so to get 5.1 both the device and your pc would need to share a compression method. this could be DDL, but there are also some others as well.

 

[matheusmello]

So, by this way it would be the HT wich would be processing the audio from the games and not the video card or am i wrong?

You said that the HT-M5 must have DDL (and so the sound card) to be able to play games in 5.1... Does it have it? What are the others technologies to play in 5.1 that you mentioned that could replace DDL?

And about the quality, will it be as good as it is when the audio is proccesed by a sound card? Will i be able to use ffdshow in this way to configure audio output?

Sorry about the dumb questions but I really do not know anything about sound cards and audio processing in the computer =/

 

[ssddx]

well i know of DDL and DTS-Connect. ac3 is another but might not be supported on your pc. well, for optical anyways. not sure if your HT has it or not (read the manual and see)

if you used hdmi there is no need for any such worries as hdmi supports uncompressed 5.1 (pcm).

hdmi offers better sound quality than optical. if you used hdmi you'd connect to the video card. if you used optical you'd connect to the sound card.

if possible i'd use hdmi.

i've never used ffdshow so cannot tell you much about it, though my own system is hooked up to output sound via hdmi (i use a receiver and ht system). you can still configure your basic sound options via windows sound devices (5.1, sound volume, other basics) though there are a few options shown on your video card software too (mirrored from windows settings basically so no need to normally touch them). generally you'd be able to control other things via the ht system receiver (volume level, sound modes, etc).

 

[matheusmello]

Thanks, helped a lot