What is the easiest way to play DTS 5.1 surround sound files encoded by Vortex Surround Encoder Pro?
You can use iTunes to play 44.1kHz – DTS encoded files – to play 5.1 material. David Battino of O’Reilly Digital Media explains: http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2008/08/itunes-surround-sound.html Thanks to clever data compression, it’s possible to pack six channels of audio into a stereo WAV file. Played back normally, this file sounds like static. But play it through a DTS or Dolby Digital decoder into a 5.1 speaker setup, and the static expands back to six-channel surround. (This Swedish radio site has a bunch of free surround WAVs to explore.) You can even burn the encoded WAV file to an audio CD and play it back in most DVD players. But configuring a computer to play these files is not so obvious. First, you’ll need a digital audio output; my Mac has a built-in S/PDIF optical output, so I was set. I just connected that to my decoder/speaker setup with a single optical cable. The unintuitive part is that changing the volume on the Mac collapses the signal back to static. To he
