S/PDIF & HDMI simultaneously?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Hi everybody,

     I would like to route the HDMI output of my WDTV Live Plus to my TV, and at the same time use the S/PDIF output to feed a DAC that is connected to a stereo amplifier.  Is this possible?  Can I use both digital outputs  simultaneously?  I want to do this because I’ve heard that the WDTV Live Plus internal DAC will only output audio at 16bit/44.1khz quality.  Thanks for any and all replies.

2

Yes, you can have HDMI video and S/PDIF audio simultaneously.

I don’t know what the limitations of S/PDIF are, so I guess it would relate to what media you’re trying to listen to.   

S/PDIF doesn’t support True-HD, I don’t think, but it does support full DD 5.1 and DTS.

By the way, there’s no involvement of a DAC when using S/PDIF.   DACs are only used for analog output.

3

Thanks for the reply TonyPH12345.  I use my WDTV Live Plus primarily for streaming audio to my hifi.  Many of my audio files are 24bit/96khz  flac files.  What I’m going to do is run the digital audio signal out of the WDTV Live  via S/PDIF into a Cambridge Audio DacMagic.  It should sound better than the analog output from the WDTV Live (which is not bad, but not audiophile quality).  Thanks again for the valuable information.

4

Hello everyone,

I have a WD TV Live Wi-Fi (WDBGXT0000NBK) connected via HDMI with my TV, LG LW4500 and I want to buy a home cinema more specially the  LG HT806PH . The problem is that it can’t decode DTS sound.

If I connect my WD TV Live via optical to the home cinema will it play the DTS sound, or the WDTV will send it as is, to the home cinema for decoding?

Currently the TV that also doesn’t support DTS if a movie has DTS sound it plays fine!

5

It depends on your settings.

If you have the WDTV set to “Stereo” then it will re-code the 5.1 DTS down to stereo and send that.  That’s presumably why you get sound on your current TV.

If you set it to pass the DTS over optical, then it will send the full 5.1 to the home theater system, yes.

6

My setting for now is Digital pass through via HDMI.

So the home theater must be able to decode it self the DTS format in order to have surround, wdtv can’t send decoded DTS sound via optical?

Sorry if it’s a silly question but I’m new to the home theater thing!

7

The WD only passes the audio streams through (hence the pass through in the settings).

Only for the stereo setting does it get downmixed into 2 channel stereo.