audio interface with 5.1 for watching movies and make music.

Steinberg Lounge
#1

Hi. I want to buy a new audio interface but I want to use it for watching movies too. (not for making music for movies, just for watching).

Is there an audio interface that can act like a receiver?

I have my old monitors and I’m planning to buy the Adam a7x and I’m thinking to connect them together i have subwoofer too so i just need to buy a reciver.
I’m thinking to do it because I don’t have more space for another 5.1 speakers, and thats a lot of money too.

i know its the ideal thing to do…
is there an audio interface like this?

thanks guys.

my pc:
Intel Core i7 9700K / 1151 Tray
Noctua NH-D15 CPU Cooler
ASUS PRIME Z390-A
Corsair DDR 4 32G (16Gx2) 3200 CL16 Vengeance LPX Black CMK32GX4M2D3200C16
Corsair RM650x 650W PSU 80+ Gold Modular
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Seagate HDD 4.0TB 256MB SATA3 BarraCuda
Gigabyte RX Vega64 8G GDDR5 GAMING OC GV-RXVEGA64GAMING OC-8GD
Fractal Design Define XL R2

#2

Not sure I understand what you mean.

I have watched movies using my built-in DVD player as well as streaming Netflix, both in 5.1 surround. Windows 10 can bass manage the outputs of my interface which is the old Lynx TWO-B (2-in/6-out). So it’s basically just a matter of choosing the audio interface as the main audio output in Windows and then play back the movie in Windows.

The drawbacks here are that I’m stuck with only the options of Windows, so there’s a limit to just how finely I can tune the bass management and delays etc. The other thing is that depending on the drivers you might not be able to run a video player and DAW at the same time. In my case it is sometimes even necessary to change a setting in the driver and reboot in order to do one or the other.

But that’s one way of doing it.

Now, if you want to feed your system a signal from an external device then I don’t know exactly how you’d do that. You’d maybe have to search around a bit.

#3

hello, i also want to buy a new audio interface but i also want to use it to watch movies on netflix at https://techbigs.com/netflix.html, is there an audio interface like this?

#4

So what I’ve heard recently is that Windows can recognize different interfaces differently depending on the drivers, and the drivers we typically use for audio production are supplied by the makers of the interface. In my case I’m using an old Lynx TWO-B PCIe card as an interface and Windows can access one output configured as 5.1 surround. This means that I can use the default computer audio output for Netflix and set that to the Lynx card. That way I get 5.1 surround when watching Netflix using their app on Windows.

Some other people have reported problems with their (other brand) interfaces using their drivers. The outputs supposedly only show up as pairs, so Windows doesn’t recognize a full 6-channel output. I’m not sure if using a generic driver like Asio4all would work.

So the answer is that I’m not 100% sure which interface to get, but the literal answer to your question is “yes”.