Ok here is the situation as it is right now, many of CD's I have (normal store bough CD's, no scratches, no smadges, clean and good) are making my speakers produce a popping sound when I play it back in a DVD player, however if I play them in my comp (connect to same speakers) the popping is gone. So gotta be the DVD player screwing up.

Since hardware upgrading is not an option, I though of a possible detour. If I could encode the CD to Dolby's AC3 and use coax out, to transfer sound to receiver, and have receiver decode it (Reciever is of much higher quality, DVD player is old and from previous set up) I would avoid the problem, since I never had a problem playing back DVDs and soundtracks that are on them (ex. Lord of The Rings soundrack on bonus DVD plenty of highs and no popping)

But is it possible to put AC3 on CD and have DVD player pass the stream to the receiver? Is there a special set up for CD needed, or can I just burn a file in Data mode? Basically I want to make a fake DVD on CD which only has the 2 channel audio.

Again no hardware upgrade/change possible atm (University bills )

It is possible to create an "AC3 WAV" and burn that as an audio CD (i.e., you would still be burning a 1:1 ratio of "normal" to "AC3" discs), and that can be easily done via Sonic Foundry's Soft Encode. But there are probably other ways to manage the same thing; essentially, the only requirement when inserting the AC3 data into a blank WAV is that it be broken up and spaced out enough to ensure the correct data transfer rate.

- M.

no, wait....




you speak like its a somewhat established process, are there more detailed guides? they may be using proprietiry software, but I just want to know what and how is being done, so I could possibly replicate it with what I might have.

Sure. This one was the first I could find in Google, but it should give you the basics of the process and you can simply adjust as needed for two-channel audio. (The process itself works fine; I played with it extensively about seven years ago.)

- M.

Do you have your receiver setup to output in stereo or Dolby Pro-Logic? My receiver sounds horrible when playing stereo material with DPL turned on.

AC3 CD-Rs were discussed previously here: Creating DD5.1 CD-R's

sweet, thanks guys, I try it asap!

Do check out whether it is because you are using Dolby Pro-Logic. That annoyed me for quite a while. I'm guessing it's a problem with my Marantz receiver as I've read that quite a lot of people listen to their music using DPL.

no it's set to Stereo, and right now it's just plugged in with regular anolog RCA left and right. PL does screw things up, it kinda changes the way it sounds.

btw, can AC3 Wav be used with a Cue, 'couse I could use audition to mark it and create a cue... maybe, right now I just doing file by file enode to ac3wav

Simplest way would be to rip each album as a single WAV+CUE, encode a single AC3 for the album from that WAV, and then use the CUE to burn your AC3 WAV. Works fine.

- M.

Edit: ... although you shouldn't try to open an AC3 WAV for further editing in a WAV editor, since you won't be able to see the waveform. All you'll see are periodic clusters of digital noise, containing the Dolby Digital information. Just use the same CUE to burn the AC3 WAV image as you would to burn a normal WAV image.

sweetness