Playback of 7-channel FLAC Surround Sound in MPC-HC

[ZeosPantera]

I have 2 files.. Evangelion 1.11 and now 2.22 that come with 7 channel lossless FLAC audio. The issues I have are when I play through my soundcard(Audigy1) to my headphones I only hear the Left front and Right front channels.

I can edit the active channels in MPC's built in Audio Switcher to get everything to play through my headphones but there is terrible distortion and crackling during high volume scenes. Is there another way to Mux it down to stereo?

Next, I have to ask how/if it is possible to play the Multi-channel Flac through my 5.1 Denon surround receiver hooked up through Coaxial Digital. Does it require an amp that supports DTS-HD or TrueHD and signal from an HDMI? Don't see the point of encoding it this way if it is impossible.

When I go to the filters menu it says "Flac audio decoder" and opening that brings up the standard AC3 - DTS passthrough menu. No options in there change what plays where so the amp basically gets just a stereo signal.

NOTE: Not running FFDshow or any other codec packs.

Newest 64-bit build of MPC-HC from here.. http://www.xvidvideo.ru/media-player-classic-home-cinema-x86-x64/

[Snowknight26]

You can only pass 2 channel PCM over S/PDIF.

MPC-HC doesn't downmix PCM apart from the crude way with the audio switcher. Install madFlac and use ffdshow to downmix.

[flanger216]

You can setup ffdshow to reencode signals to AC3 on the fly, then send that over S/PDIF to your receiver. There will be a slight quality loss (definite bit-rate reduction, probable bit-depth reduction and possible downsampling), but that's the only way you can playback multichannel FLACs over a coaxial connection.

And like Snowknight suggested, you should use also use ffdshow if you want to downmix to stereo. IIRC, the latest builds even include HRTF functions, so you can get virtualized surround over headphones.

[Midzuki]

The issues I have are when I play through my soundcard(Audigy1) to my headphones I only hear the Left front and Right front channels.

Considering Audigy 1 supports no more than 6 channels,
then I wonder if the "Surrounder" DSP plugins of the kx driver
couldn't do a proper downmix for that sound card

(obviously, I'm supposing you haven't tried kx
— or other alternative drivers — yet).

[ZeosPantera]

Considering Audigy 1 supports no more than 6 channels,
then I wonder if the "Surrounder" DSP plugins of the kx driver
couldn't do a proper downmix for that sound card

(obviously, I'm supposing you haven't tried kx
— or other alternative drivers — yet).

Never even heard of. The card currently doesn't output anything but stereo to my headphones and I have an addon ribbon cable connected card that comes off of the A1 and gives me fullsize Fiber in/out and CoaxD in /out.

Thank you for all the replies btw. I use to use ffdshow but it got to the point I figured it was making thinks look even worse so I stopped using it. I have reinstalled the newest beta and disabled all the video decoding options. Now I just have to fiddle until I get the AC3 output correct for the flac downmix.