Surround Sound in G5s?

[bobindashadows]

Ok, now I've been wondering if we can get surround sound in Macs. It was my impression that you Jaguar doesn't support Surround Sound. However, since the new macs have S/PDIF out, and Toslink (I have no clue what this stuff means), will there be hardware decoding of Dolby? Will Panther head up the software part of that?

in short: will we be able to plug in 5.1/6.1 speakers to those G5s, and finally deck out the entertainment center?

 

[evolu]

Yes - a surround system is actually an option on the G5 order page.

I think the problem before was the dvd drive itself couldn't support surround sound. The new one's on the G5 do.

edit: but you can't just plug in any system - you have to utilize the optical out and use a surround system with all the proper decoding.

 

[000111one111000]

Inside DVD Player in Panther, there is an option for "Surround Sound."

So yes, Macs now support surround sound. I don't know how this will work on non-G5 or Macs that aren't updated before Panther comes out, but the software part is now there.

enoch

 

[hvfsl]

The G5 Macs only support digital surround sound, so you can't get some cheap 5.1 speakers for $100 and use them with the G5. Although you should be able to use digital speakers from companies like creative and philips.

Jaguar already supports a lot of multi channel sound cards like the sound blaster exdigy, but it only works in stereo on current Macs. Hopefully they will work in 5.1 sound when Panther is installed.

Also about the DVD player in Panther, I hope it supports the hardware de-interlacing on the ATI cards so I no longer get the horizontal line effects when playing DVDs not released in the cinema, like TV shows of DVD.

 

[pianojoe]

Originally posted by evolu

I think the problem before was the dvd drive itself couldn't support surround sound. The new one's on the G5 do.

Huh? DVD drives provide files that are read by the OS just as any other drive does. You can even watch a DVD movie from your HD if it's not encrypted. The drive itself doesn't come into this.

The question is wether the player software will decode and provide multichannel audio to CoreAudio (a part of the OS). Then you could easily connect a multichannel audio interface (optical or even Firewire like the MOTU 828) as long as there's a CoreAudio driver for it.