INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => Media Center 12 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: toplastic on February 24, 2008, 08:36:43 am
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Hi!
I have a Soundblaster X-fi 7.1 and I'm trying to get synced audio to all zones.
All zones are sett to Asio and playing diffrent songs works perfect! But when I tries to play one song on all zones theres a delay. (i have tried timing but it dosent work any good)
Is there anyway to fix this? plugin? sync to clock on soundcard? new better soundcard?
Thanx
toplastic
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Unfortunately, zone synching is very hard. I believe that playing around with the delay settings is the best you can do on the MC end. Of course, you can do things with physical cabling that will fully synchronize zones (splitters, multi-channel amps, etc.)
The only player that I've seen do very accurate 'zone synching' out of the box is actually iTunes with their 'AirTunes' technology sending audio to the AirPort Express wireless base station.
After spending some time tuning the delays, how bad are things?
brad
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They will never be so good that you can stand between two zones without hearing it. Period. Which is why I use a master zone that is routed into all the other zones' inputs. That just works, without any problems.
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My trouble with the zone-syncing issue is that my amp can split an analogue signal and send it to different zones just fine but cannot split a digital signal. So if I want to use a master zone and split it up on my own, I have to let my sound card to the D/A conversion. My amp does it a million times better. (Yamaha RX-V1800, Burr-Brown DACs)
So if I use two zones (one fed through my spdif and the other on my line out) then I have to synchronize... not bad if I have one indoor and one ourdoor zone going, but if I have my living room and my kitchen going together then the delay is very noticeable.
So what I do is I have two setups: spdif if I am watching a movie or doing some dedicated listening in my living room, or analogue if I'm playing something in multiple zones. Oh well.