The woes of digital audio and a plea for help

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not sure where to put this, as it contains both a General Question, a request for Opinions, and a slight Pitting. Mods, thy will be done.

Last night, I was excited to discover that my sound card (a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1) has a digital out port on it. You see, I had been connecting my computer to my receiver with two mini-jack to RCA Y-connectors, one for the front channel and one for the rear. But, since we wanted to reorganized the living room, I was happy to find that I could replace these four cables with a single cable carrying digital audio.

Except that it didn’t work.

I connected a mono mini jack up to the digital out with a converter to RCA for the receiver, and I got… nothing.

On a lark, I tried connecting a Y-connector, and I found a curious thing. One of the outputs was carrying the digital stream for the front channel, and one for the back channel. This is, of course, no good to me, since I have only one digital input on my receiver. Actually, it’s probably no good to anyone since the whole fucking point of digital is to carry the whole signal on one cable and let the receiver do the processing.

A little bit of web sleuthing, and I found that many people have this same problem, with all manner of Creative sound cards, not just the cheapo Live!. Apparently, it is possible to set the speaker setup to 2 speakers in software and pass through the full signal from, say, DVDs with digital sound. But there’s still no way to get all my non-digitally encoded audio (say, iTunes) to play on all of my speakers. So, nuts to Creative for making their digital output incredibly limited and stupid.

Next, the general question and opinion part: What setup do you use for connecting your computers to a digital receiver? What kind of budget but non-crappy sound card would you recommend? I do have an optical digital in on my receiver, so I would consider going that route if convenient.

2

I may have sort of figured out the answer to this.

Creative tech support sent me this link, which eventually explained to me that the digital out actually has 4 connectors, and you need a special cable that goes mini-jack to digital DIN connector to get all the signals. My receiver doesn’t have a DIN port, so oh well.

However, you can still get DVD surround sound to pass through the coax digital cable, so I claim that Creative is just being stupid or lazy by not supporting all the speakers that way as well.

Perhaps my receiver can be set up to have the back channel reproduce the front when only a stereo signal is received.