YES! - yes yes yes... amazing what articles pop up in the "New post feeds' here... I am so down with doing this hack... worth twice the price of admission here at ASR... didn't get a nickname the-cheap-seats for nothing...
my receiver will do surround virtualization with the headphone jack or with a 2.1. this will allow me to use a dac/amp for my headphones and use the sub preout for my bass shakers. i can watch movies late at night or early am on the weekends and not worry about distrubing the neighbors. all the processing will be done by the receiver. so hdmi source > avr > spdif - dac; sub-preout to bass shakers, dac -> headphone amp -> headphones -> me listening to 7.1 with bass shakers and my headphones.
no, the receiver applies the dsp and virtualizes a stereo signal into surround. tap that digital stereo signal, convert that to spdif digital out, feed sdpif that to a seperate dac/amp, not an external dsp. if you want to use an external dsp, then i wouldn't use the receiver. i'd use an hdmi audio extractor. i want to use the avr's dsp, because the only standalone one that does it for headphones that i know of is like 5 grand usd. not even close to obtainable for me lol
Save up a few years, and you may be able to afford a second hand Smyth Realiser. An HDMI audio extractor for 8 digital channels also doesn't seem to exist, so you'd be back to soldering 4 of the WM8804 boards in an analog extractor, but then you could route that to an interface, into a PC, through the sofalizer plugin, and back out in stereo to your favorite DAC as a homemade Realiser minus the head tracking. Getting your own SOFA file is unfortunately left as an exercise to the reader, and would also be more straightforward, if not necessarily easier with a Realiser.
since you were able to imagine I - or anyone - wrote audible, you should be able to imagine that there are people out there who can imagine that the DACs in their AVR are audibly worse.
lol even then, by the time it's affordable, i bet it'll be outdated with technology. im sure eventually others will make a standalone dsp for headphones. this is good enough for me, as it's specific use case, including using bass shakers with my sonos arc.
Do you think this also can be done on a external 5.1 decoder DAC that doesn’t have a digital output board?
I've got no idea what a "5.1 decoder DAC" is supposed to be, but whatever it is, as long as it has DACs that get fed I²S sound, it should be possible to tap into that and extract all 6 channels as S/PDIF.
I can't. Open it, check what's inside, download the datasheets and study them. If it's all integrated into a single chip, there may be no way to even access the necessary signals. Without datasheets, it's all wild speculation. A regular sized AVR might be a better target simply due to the space available inside.
The whole point of this exercise is to have an AVR with all the decoding, room correction and what have you, but instead of the usual analog output have digital outputs and do whatever you desire with that signal, without going digital to analog and back again to digital.
Anything the modified AVR used to do is done the same way after the mod. The AVR won't know the difference.
