In article ,
Andy Burns   wrote:
>druck wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know of a USB sound card compatible with the Raspberry Pi
>> (i.e. Linux) which can do 5.1 surround sound over S/PDIF?
>
>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

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.

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/           Top-posting!
 \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05