Down mix Dolby Digital/DTS to 2/2.1

[JasonWat]

Edit: I immediately found something that might work... If you have personal experience with a particular device, please share your thoughts.


Do any of you know of a quality device that will accept Dolby Digital/DTS and downmix it to 2/2.1? I've seen a few devices out there, but most seem to be cheaply made and/or don't work well. I'm really wanting to build a push-pull EL34 or KT88 amplifier and use it in place of a modern home theater receiver, but 6+ channels with vacuum tubes is likely to heat the room up a bit too much... Anyone have experience with a device like that? 2.1 would be ideal, but I'd settle for vanilla stereo.

 

[justin_r_23]

Essentially all devices that output digital multichannel audio (DVD / Blu-ray / Set-top-boxes like Apple TV) will downmix multichannel to 2.1 (in the absence of a native 2.1 PCM track). You don’t say what your source is, but DVD players and Blu-ray players, if they have analog outputs for multichannel, will output the downmixed 2-channel stereo mix on the RCAs labeled “L/R front” (I think my Panasonic uses “L/R rear” for some reason). TVs will output downmixed 2 channel PCM to S/PDIF over toslink if it’s available to a 2 channel DAC, so no translation is needed really. You have to set your devices to PCM 2 channel pass-through, so they don’t transmit the digital audio to where it can’t be decoded.

Even your computer: Windows Media Player, for example, will decode and downmix Dolby Atmos files to whatever channels are available on the output.