At the risk of adding extra complexity to something that is already complex, am I right in thinking that if you are playing a DVD, the sound is potentially playable through two (ie stereo) speakers but contains "Dolby" or similar coding that allows an encoder to extract several additional "layers" and thus send a signal through a decoding home cinema style amp to up to six or eight speakers (two front, two rear, one centre and one sub)?
There do exist multichannel PA amps that have four or eight channels (I have one that I'm intending to use for Hauptwerk), and each of these channels would need a single signal from four, six or eight outputs on the audio card. That seems quite logical, sort of similar to connecting active speakers to each of your soundcard outputs but all the amplification being done in one big black box rather than in the speakers. But I don't know if a multichannel amp would be any use for home cinema 5.1 surround sound setup. Of course, when we talk about surround sound in the context of DVDs we mean an arrangement of three speakers up front, two behind and a sub, whereas Hauptwerk has two up front and two rear, and then separately you figure where the sub goes.
Two bits where I'm confused are, firstly if you have Hauptwerk and a home cinema style surround sound, do you have to merge the channels together to pump them into the surround-sound amp, which then splits them up again (e.g. using the optical output of the 1010LT soundcard)? Or does all the decoding happen within the PC and you connect six or eight cables into your home cinema amp? (Put another way, is a home cinema amp approprate for Hauptwerk)? Secondly, is the subwoofer fed a separate channel of low-frequency sounds, or do you feed a stereo sound source (ie two cables) into the sub, which takes off and plays the low frequencies, and spits out the high frequencies so that you plug in your two main speakers into the sub?
There do exist multichannel PA amps that have four or eight channels (I have one that I'm intending to use for Hauptwerk), and each of these channels would need a single signal from four, six or eight outputs on the audio card. That seems quite logical, sort of similar to connecting active speakers to each of your soundcard outputs but all the amplification being done in one big black box rather than in the speakers. But I don't know if a multichannel amp would be any use for home cinema 5.1 surround sound setup. Of course, when we talk about surround sound in the context of DVDs we mean an arrangement of three speakers up front, two behind and a sub, whereas Hauptwerk has two up front and two rear, and then separately you figure where the sub goes.
Two bits where I'm confused are, firstly if you have Hauptwerk and a home cinema style surround sound, do you have to merge the channels together to pump them into the surround-sound amp, which then splits them up again (e.g. using the optical output of the 1010LT soundcard)? Or does all the decoding happen within the PC and you connect six or eight cables into your home cinema amp? (Put another way, is a home cinema amp approprate for Hauptwerk)? Secondly, is the subwoofer fed a separate channel of low-frequency sounds, or do you feed a stereo sound source (ie two cables) into the sub, which takes off and plays the low frequencies, and spits out the high frequencies so that you plug in your two main speakers into the sub?