Hey All,
I have some audio output questions that I was hoping to get answered. First of all, some background on my setup. I primarily use JRiver to play my library of music files (mostly FLAC (both 16/44.1 and 24/192) and some mp3) from my desktop computer. I output WASAPI audio out of my ATI 5770 GPU via HDMI going to my a/v receiver (Emotiva UMC-200). In general, I have the DSP Studio Output Format window set to output 2 channel audio at 192khz for all sample rates. This works just great for my music because it upsamples all of my CD quality FLAC files (not sure that it actually does anything), while giving me the full resolution of the 24/192 files that I have as well. The only problem with this method is that my receiver apparently can't take a 24/192 signal and apply "fake processing" (Prologic IIx, DTS Neo:6, etc.) to a 2 channel audio stream. This is normally fine as I prefer to listen to music in 2 channel anyway rather than spreading it around my 7.1 system as I feel it sounds better and more natural that way.
However, I recently started playing a few DVD's through my computer and I realized that I probably wasn't outputting 5.1 audio because of the way that I had JRiver set up for my music. Any dvd that I play will have the audio output at the 192 sample rate, which means a) I can't spread the audio into my 7.1 setup due to the limitations of my receiver, and b) even if I was able to spread the audio with prologic IIx or Neo:6, JRiver is only sending the L/R channels of audio, not the full 5.1 soundtrack. Now, I can fix issue A by chaning the output format to 48khz instead of 192khz whenever I watch a movie, and then change it back to 192 after I'm done, but I'm still left with issue B (it's not outputting 5.1 audio). When I try to change the output from 2ch (stereo) to "source number of channels" or "5.1" JRiver tells me that "something went wrong with playback" and tells me to change it back to a 2ch output instead of the source or 5.1 options. This happens with both 48khz and 192khz sample rate selections in the Output Format dialogue box.
So, a few questions:
1) First of all, the most important thing is figuring out how to get a DVD to output it's 5.1 audio through JRiver and out via HDMI to my receiver.
2) Is there a way to configure JRiver to output either 2ch or 5.1ch (or 7.1ch) based on the source that it is playing?
3) Is there a way to bypass or ignore the sample rate selection in the properties section of my playback devices in Windows 7? (so that JRiver can determine the computer's output sample rate, otherwise I have to manually change the windows 7 output device properties every time I switch back and forth.)
Thanks in advance for the help!