XBMC Digital Audio

[shady7]

Hi everyone, just bought myself a Panasonic Blu-ray Disc Home Theater system. I am thinking of purchasing monster cable component leads with digital audio output and plugging it into the Home Theater system. What I would like to know is the digital audio that much clearer than the component leads I am using now. A lot of the movies I watch are downloads and the audio is mp3 or aac 128kb/s and up, would I even notice the difference and where abouts can I purchase monster component cable, I have only seen them on ebay and its quite pricey, cant find anything in New Zealand. Any advice would be great Cheers

[xman]

I personally preferred the coax output better than the optical solely because the volume was so much more the normal volume using coav rather than the optical which was so much quieter. I hate needing to constantly adjust the volume on my T.V.s.. I have digital sound only on one machine now though because I really didn't think it was that good for the required effort. Component video however on the video side is. It is relatively easy to mod the machine so it outputs component and coax sound only, if you can't get hold of the right cables by hardwiring. Not saying this will suit everyone's application but might be worth considering after all, not many people will ever go back to a CRT with only AVI inputs ever again anyway?.

[shady7]

Thanks xman coax does sound good but unfortunately the Blu-ray home theater system only has optical digital audio in. When you say optical digital audio is quiet, do you have to keep adjusting volume on tv? Is digital audio much better quality than red/white audio in the component leads thanks for your time

[xman]

Yer, I was constantly needing to adjust the volume up when using the optical sound that would need to be dropped back down to use the T.V. as normal as in free to air. Another downside was the 5.1 surround was good on the surround setup but no volume was available at all on the standard stereo setup meaning I needed to rip movies with both 5.1 and stereo sound tracks to get around this so the same movie could be viewed on both types of sound setups.

[psyko_chewbacca]

I find it odd that you get different sound levels when using Coax vs TOSLINK. Logically they are exactly the same signal, bit for bit and at the same transmission rate. It's the same datastream transfering at the same speed, only the medium of transmission is different.

Check this site, it's really informative:
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.html

More than that, this sort of digital audio feed does not have volume control as we know on analog audio transmission. Yes the volume will vary depending on the general amplitude of the source feed but it's safe to assume that if you're watching a movie, audio will have been trimmed and leveled to a standard level in post production.

Maybe it's your audio receiver that handles both signals differently? Frankly it's the first time I heard someone getting different volume levels between Coax and TOSLINK!

For my part I prefer TOSLINK, mostly because it's on every equipement but also because cables are cheap and virtually immune to interference (unless you watch TV with an active source bombarding neutrons on your TV set!).

[BuZz]

you are right - there is no difference, so it would have to be something to do with whatever is plugged in at the other end.