I’ve been using the digital audio output from my PC to my Receiver/Amplifier for about 10 years now. The sound quality is excellent for normal audio because there is no loss or noise between the PC and Amplifier. DVDs and videos are also excellent because the multi-channel AC3 or DTS can be sent directly to the Receiver without requiring any processing. All this on a simple, cheap Coax cable.
The downside was the lack of support from games (also possibly a limit with Microsoft’s DirectX system). Thus far the only way to get multi-channel for games was to plugin in 6 analogue audio channels from the PC and snake the cables over to the Receiver. Sound quality was not great, and it removed the ability for the Receiver to do audio processing to compensate for room acoustics. You could see examples of this frustration on support forums such as Valve’s, with threads spanning hundreds of posts from users trying to find a solution to this audio gap.
There was one hardware design that solved this – the nForce2 chipset with “Soundstorm”. It could apparently encode multi-channel audio into AC3 in realtime using the onboard audio chipset. The only problems was it has been years since the nForce2 was on the market (currently nForce4 is the de-facto standard). The most common rumour I heard to explain the lack of Soundstorm on subsequent nForce chipsets was problems with licensing the AC3 codec.
In steps DTS to the rescue. Just recently I discovered some motherboards were shipping with new technology called DTS Connect. One of the features, “DTS Interactive”, is a realtime stream encoder that converts multi-channel PC audio into a DTS stream.
Enabling DTS Interactive is as easy as two clicks – open the Audio control panel and switch on DTS. The beauty of this is it works system-wide regardless of what applications. So now I can play Half-Life 2 (and all other recent games) with exquisite multi-channel DTS audio.