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Dolby Digital Live????

post #1 of 8
2/13/07 at 8:40am
Thread Starter 
Can someone explain to me exactly what dolby digital live is? i'm not going to use my system for gaming but i do have a ton of music and i'm wondering if ddl does anything for that? I'm planning on gatting a new sound card with optical out for dd/dts so is ddl something i want even though the pc won't really be used for games? Thanks. Gary.
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post #2 of 8
2/13/07 at 9:35am

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

Explanation is here.

http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/x-plosion.php
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post #3 of 8
2/13/07 at 10:37am
Thread Starter 

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

i have read that before but i guess what i'm looking for is personal experience.
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post #4 of 8
2/13/07 at 1:38pm

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

I see. I was looking at the same card, but then someone suggested the turtle beach 7.1 card for $30. Not sure if both cards are equivalent when it comes to decoding 7.1 audio.
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post #5 of 8
2/13/07 at 4:14pm

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

PCs have traditionally supported direct 5.1 channel sound; i.e. 6 distinct channels, just like stereo times three. To take advantage of that, you needed to hook up three stereo connections from the sound card to your PC speaker system. These are analog connections.

Dolby Digital Live will encode the 5.1 sound into Dolby Digital, uh, live. So that means you can use an optical or coax digital connection to your home theater system (and some PC speaker systems with DD decoders).

For non-gamers, this is not particularly useful unless the sound card also has something like Dolby ProLogic II, which will convert any stereo source into 5.1 sound without sounding fake.

These two Dolby technologies, DDL and DPL-II, are independent with their own advantages -- single-wire digital connections and surround sound from stereo sources -- but are particularly useful together. I have a Bluegears card with both, and it works well. The one downside is that, for whatever reason, the machine no longer goes to sleep automatically, maybe because it's constantly outputting a DD signal. If it did not, there would be dropouts or pops whenever sound starts. Even so, it might just be a driver issue.
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post #6 of 8
2/14/07 at 7:56am

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

The big downside for me as an HTPC user is that it compresses my 2 channel audio into DD as well. This leads to a drop in quality for music playback.

If a recording is already in DD on my HDD, I don't need DDL, in fact, the recompression is not wanted so it's better to just pass it through. I can see if you have a multichannel format like mpeg that your receiver can't decode, DDL would be handy but I've never had that issue. Modern receivers have DPL-II built into them, so that processing can be done there without compression.

It's useful only if you have multi-channel audio generated by the application itself, the obvious case being games, as mentioned above.
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post #7 of 8
2/14/07 at 6:37pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

Ok, so just want to make sure i understand. DDL is more for gaming and since the only thing i want the machine to do is movies and mp3 music or streamed music off the net DDL really isn't going to gain me anything. My receiver is pre dpl-II so i don't have that option. I'm running a Denon AVR-4800. Thanks.
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post #8 of 8
2/15/07 at 3:03pm

Re: Dolby Digital Live????

No. The question is whether the sound card also has Dolby ProLogic II (or something similar). Then you've got:

Stereo music
DPL-II --> 5.1 music
DDL --> 5.1 DD music
optical/coax --> 5.1 music from your Denon

As Phill said, DDL will apply compression; the question is: can you tell? Would that bother you, or would having 5.1 music be better? That's a personal call.

The same would apply to movies/videos or TV shows that are in stereo. For DVD that are already in DD 5.1 or DTS, you would want to use direct pass-through of the digital bitstream.
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