Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Optical Audio is hard to convert to 5.1 analog



This is my situation:

I have an AppleTV that is connected to my television with an HDMI cable.  It works great!
Except, the sound is played on the speakers on my TV.  Not terrible since my TV is relatively new and has good sound.

Ideally, I would like to be able to watch a movie on my TV and have the sound come out of my 5.1 stereo system.  The AppleTV has an optical audio output and I have an optical cable, but my stereo system does not have an optical audio input!

I've looked around and asked around a bit but there doesn't seem to be a converter that will convert an optical audio stream into six 5.1 audio outputs.  At least not for a reasonable price.   There ARE reasonably priced converters that will convert optical audio into left and right outputs (ie: no 5.1)

My other basic problem is that my stereo system doesn't have 6 external inputs to re-route to the 6 speakers. So the best I could do is left and right audio.

So my three possible solutions are:

  1. Don't do anything and just use my TV's speakers
  2. Buy a reasonably priced converter and only get stereo (not 5.1) which is basically the same as using my TV speakers
  3. Buy a new stereo that has an optical audio input.
Check out my YouTube channel:  www.youtube.com/KedarWarriner

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