USB Sound card with surround over optical?

You can't do true 5.1 over S/PDIF, so you'd need a USB device that could encode to compressed DTS or AC3

I think you'll struggle, just maybe something like this? Double-check it can do what you want ...

I use one of these (well a similar item)

HDMI repeater with S/PDIF and/or RCA sound extraction

--
Chris Elvidge 
England

There is an "A52" ALSA plugin to allow surround encoded files to play.

Been a long while since I fiddled with it.

Does your blueray speaker set have HDMI and hence some sort of audio return channel support?

--
Adrian C

A better solution IMHO is to query your assumptions - why on earth use USB? You have HDMI sound already so...

will give you 5 channel optical sound from that, allegedly...

--
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight  
and understanding". 

Marshall McLuhan

The old surround sound system is from 2009 so doesn't support HDMI arc, only optical in from the old TV of the same vintage.

However thanks for the link above, as that may help me get the Pi in the living room to do surround sound with the new TV/soundbar. So far I've not managed to get the Pi to do anything other than stereo.

The Linux laptop with an nVidia card had a bit more luck with that setup, the 5.1 and 7.1 devices worked albeit with the centre and subwoofer swapped. When I tried to reconfigure that, I lost sound completely and had to wind back the configuration.

---druck

Thanks for that, it may be worth trying if I can get another Raspberry Pi to do 5.1 or 7.1 over HDMI to the new 9.4.1 soundbar, so far only its only wanted to stereo.

---druck

d

That's useful to know, explains why the cheap ones don't do it.

heck

Yes, I could get a fairly decent set of speakers for that.

---druck

Does it do 5.1 on the optical though? The description seems to suggest 2 channel PCM on SPDIF or nothing.

---druck

Also in cheapass ebay version:

(I think it's the same thing, just a photo rather than a render)

If you're on a Pi 4, I wonder if you could use the second HDMI port just for audio?

Theo

I only use it through a stereo system. However, the HDMI to the TV, and then optical out to a 5.1 DVD player digital aux input is OK. I'll try it and let you know.

--
Chris Elvidge 
England

If the HDMI digital is 5.1, why shouldn't the digital optical be 5.1 too? The RCA outputs have been run through a D/A converter, so stereo.

--
Chris Elvidge 
England

If by "true 5.1" you mean multichannel PCM audio, that's correct, but if your sources are DTS or AC3 audio under ~1.5 Mbps (AC3 maxes out at 640 kbps IIRC) or if you have some means to transcode on-the-fly, you can pass multichannel audio over S/PDIF just fine. I did that for years with a MythTV frontend into an older receiver. Cheap soundcards worked just fine, so long as they had S/PDIF output.

Come to think of it, for a while I think I was using a USB S/PDIF adapter instead of a soundcard. I don't recall having to look for anything in particular; USB sound devices of all sorts tend to work without problems with Linux.

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I don't know if playing DTS or AC3 audio on the Pi connected to the new surround system via HDMI is being sent in that form over HDMI, it certainly isn't sound as if it is.

Multichannel PCM isn't working as no amount of setting up ALSA or PulseAudio is giving anything other than a 2 channel down mix when using speakertest, regardless of the device.

I first need Pi's internal HDMI output to do 5.1, before I can think about using SPDIF for the old sound system.

It's looking like far more effort than it is worth.

---druck