Get a dumpster surround sound system to play from my Macbook?
In your Applications folder is a sound control program; it’s not in your regular control panel. I don’t remember what it’s called. You should be able to remap your 3D sound channels onto any device, so you can have front left and right through the standard out, and then rear left and right through the Xitel card. I haven’t worked with this myself, but I believe you’ll be able to remap 5.1 multichannel sound to the 4.1 channels you do have in a fairly reasonable way. It may let you mirror stereo signals into surround sound for more presence as well. Note that even if you buy a TOSlink-to-5.1 adapter for your Mac, you will only get stereo through the optical jack. It’s just a stereo jack. It can play in analog or in digital, and if you’re in digital mode it can pass through a pre-compressed 5.1 or 6.1 signal from a DVD, but the Mac does not see it as a multichannel device. Buying an external decoder will let you decode that passthrough bitstream, but not all the cheap external units even
If you buy an external decoder, you can use it only with DVDs, and you’re not guaranteed it can handle a phantom center properly. If you have enough analog outputs for your channels, the Mac’s own Core Audio should do everything you need without spending any additional money at all. After searching a little more, though, I’m not sure you do. You appear to have only two stereo pairs out; the Xitel and the onboard sound. But you need five channels; L,R,RL,RR, and subwoofer. The Boston unit doesn’t appear to do internal crossover for you. What I’d suggest first: just try it with four channels and see if you can get any bass out of the sub. if you can’t, then either you’ll need something like a Firewave or an external decoder. Remember that the external decoder will work ONLY for movies, where the Firewave will work with everything.
Well, the full retail price is $80 on the SRM, so ‘cheap’ would be up to you. I believe the hardware is identical. As far as my hatred of the A2NX goes… that’s a different soundcard than anything else in Creative’s lineup. All of the Creative cards do a 48Khz resample by default. They’ve been improving it steadily, and they have added 44.1Khz native modes in most of the more advanced cards. The Extigy might be included, I don’t know. So, over time, they’ve gone from sounding kinda crummy to much better; the X-Fi can actually do bitperfect with a little effort. I think your Extigy is probably either based on the Audigy 2 (fairly ok, not great) or Audigy 4(quite good), which would be why you like it. The 2NX… that thing is so terrible you wouldn’t believe it. i think what’s happening is that it’s doing that same 48khz resample, but it’s doing a godawful job of it. You might not notice on bad speakers, but on good gear, it’s like listening underwater or something. The treble is just a
