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[Vreejack]

I have an external audio decoder that can handle DTS over S/PDIF. Speaker system is 7.1

When I test the 7.1 speakers using Windows audio config it doesn't seem to work; the back speakers show up in the front, probably because I have no way to compress 7.1 onto S/PDIF. Yes?

But can I at least send DTS data out that way from other sources if I have it?

I am using a 7.1 audio card via USB, but it has no actual DTS capability and I wouldn't use it anyway. I just want to forward the  audio stream to my decoder via S/PDIF.

What if I bought a USB-->HDMI converter and used it for audio? Blast it all, I would not be having this problem if my TV just had a HDMI out connection.

[RussellS]

The problem is that S/PDIF only supports 2 channels of uncompressed audio. In order to get 5.1 or 7.1 etc the channels have to be DTS or AC3 encoded. So when you test the speakers using Windows audio config you are not encoding the audio so you will only get 2 channels with the rear and center channels fed to the front L/R speakers.

In MC if you have bitstreaming enabled then the DTS/AC3 audio track on a DVD will be passed through to your audio decoder via S/PDIF. Also you can set up MC to encode the audio automatically to Dolby Digital. Goto 'Tools --> Audio --> Settings --> DSD & output format' then enable the output format tick box and set 'Output Encoding' to 'Dolby Digital.

You can also test your speakers properly by selecting the 'Room Correction' entry and you can turn each speaker on/off individually and also send a test tone to each speaker as well.

[Vreejack]

That was a big help, thank you. I turned off all encoding as I would rather let my dedicated decoder handle all that. It even has room/speaker compensation already programmed in.

And I was able to turn down the buffer size to get rid of that obnoxious 500ms latency.