Surround Sound from Cubase to 5.1 Receiver

Cubase
,
#1

This is not exactly a Cubase issue but it is related to Cubase outputs.

It seems simple.

We use a Focusrite interface and Octopre with 16 channels of audio

We would like to output 5.1 surround sound from Cubase to our Pioneer home Theatre System to monitor our mixes.

A DVD player, for example, uses the Optical cable to play 5.1 sound.

Can we do the same from Cubase and how? Are any producers on this forum mixing in surround in this particular way?

I know we can use five active monitors but we have sitting here a perfectly good Surround sound receiver and speakers already setup. Am I the only person to have thought of this?

I contacted Focusrite directly but they seemed to have no idea. :cry:

#2

Hi,

You need an Audio Device/Interface (sound card) which offer this kind of optical 5.1 output.

#3

Excellent thank you Martin,

Are you aware of a Audio Device/Interface (sound card) that offers this kind of optical 5.1 output?

#4

Hi,

What about UR816C?

#5

Sorry Martin that’s VERY unlikely - just because there is an optical out doesn’t mean it will work

that output is most likely spdif (stereo) maybe even switchable to ADAT (8 channel) - these aren’t ‘surround’ formats

optical (toslink) doesn’t have a huge amount of bandwidth - enough for stereo or compressed (dolby/DTS) multichannel …ADAT uses a different data format to squeeze the extra data in - it’s not what your amp is expecting so it won’t work.

There are (Expensive) boxes to do what you want but I don’t know of a cheap version - and some home AV amps have separate (LRCLsRsLFE) inputs for surround but if not then there isn’t really a simple way. It’s possible that some cheap audio cards built into the PC would do it ? - sometimes they have ‘surround capable’ toslink connectors but I have no idea if cubase could address these outputs individually for mixing purposes. It would need to do realtime AC3 encoding or something similar.

Welcome to the wonderful world of surround - lots of ‘non’ standards - (+10db for LFE ? SMPTE channel order ? etc etc)