Help! Home PC to Receiver 411 Options

[dmoss74]

Okay, my goals are simple (at least I think so), but they are causing much consternation here.

in a nutshell, i have many cds ripped to flac, as well as some other hd audio (24/96, plus multitchannel 24/96) files stored on my computer (PC). i got a new yamaha receiver that has some decent bb dacs on board, so all i'm trying to do is get the files from foobar, into the receiver.

this is proving way more daunting than i had hoped for. at this point, my options appear as such:

one of the logitech squeezebox device
getting a laptop that will have hdmi output on it, although i hear that hd audio and hdmi aren't exactly friendly.
getting one of the boxed "servers" that cater more to the tv crowd than audio folks.

any help would be appreciated. i can put a decent home recording sound card in the pc (echo mia, etc), but i'd like to avoid that.

i did see a device called an m2tech that has a usb to rca coax output, and is supposed to decode all the way to 192, so that looked interesting.

any help would be greatly appreciated. again, i'd like to use the native dacs and tone stack if possible, but will of course entertain other options. i'm trying to stay around 300 for the budget.

This post has been edited by dmoss74: Apr 28 2012, 05:21

[JimH]

You can get a video card that has HDMI out. The Nvidia 430, for example. The HDMI link will work for both audio and video.

Your TV won't have to be on in order to play audio.

The connection from the PC should go to the receiver and then a connection from the receiver to the TV.

To get multi channel output, you need to pass an unaltered signal to the receiver. This is sometimes called Bitstreaming.

You can use Windows Control Panel/Sounds to test the multi-channel capabilities. It must work there before it will work from any audio player.