5.1 Audio on X-Fi via SPDIF out to A/V Receiver

Fairly recently, I had a reasonably good Sony A/V Receiver passed down to me (a perk of having a somewhat tech savvy dad haha). With that, I was happy that I could finally move on to a full digital output (as well as hook up my misc other stuff like my HD Satellite decoder, PS3, and Xbox 360) and use my HDTV as a monitor only.

However, I was dismayed that the way SPDIF out works on all Soundblasters is that if the source of the audio isn't encoded in Dolby/DTS (and their many types), then I would only get Stereo audio only. Needless to say, I found this somewhat disappointing as not all games have audio in that format. After a lot of tweaking, I at least managed to get Foobar2000 to playback to my satisfaction (I am INSANELY picky on audio lol). But still, it didn't solve my gaming experience.

So after a while, I found out that there was this thing called Dobly Digital Live / DTS Connect. DDL/DTS Connect pretty much encodes audio on the fly over a single SPDIF connection (ZOMG YAY). However, it is only enabled by default for the latest X-Fi card (Titanium) and the Auzentech Prelude cards (ultra high end X-Fis). I further found out that there was someone who managed to hack that feature (aka re-enabling). Though it seems that I am a bit too late as the drivers have been pretty much removed. Plus I read that there are some bugs for the X-Fi implementations (pfft). Fortunately (well semi fortunately), I found that Creative offered 'unlocks' for this feature for most of the 'normal full' X-Fi cards (I bet people were PISSED that they knowlingly disabled a feature of the card). It's called the Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect Pack. It pretty much allows you to encode all audio into DDL or DTS to a digital output so you can enjoy 5.1 audio. Now the keyword is DIGITAL. If you are just using the three analog outputs at the back fo the card, save your $4.72 as you won't be needing this.

Encoder window

So how was it? Well rather surprisingly, it actually works. Kinda surprising for something that came from Creative. I am using DTS Interactive (I personally prefer DTS over DD) and it sounds awesome! The audio in game is soooo awesome. One thing is that it gets pretty loud (had to turn down the volume). But hey, 5.1 is 5.1. At least I see all six speakers detected on my A/V Receiver now instead of 3. Supposedly, it uses CPU power for the encoding but I didn't see any abnormal CPU usage in game (then again, my CPU is overclocked quite a bit).

5 bucks well spent.