Hey,

So I have a PC with optical out and a selection of speakers to choose from, including a massive passive subwoofer. I also have a 6-channel amplifier which accepts the optical in from the PC. Normally I use this in stereo or 2.1, but the crossover point in the amp isn’t quite right.

Does anyone have experience of software that I can run in Windows 10 that will modify the output from the S/PDIF optical so it’s crossed-over before the amp, such that I can run the amp in optical in poweramp mode, and use the 6 channels to drive separate signals to the speakers and sub. 2-way is OK, 3-way might be good too [though I worry that driving the tweeter alone might not make the amplifier happy].

NB the sub is dual-driver passive, so stereo OR mono sub out is OK.

Other features like delay/frequency curve response would be great, but just a solid crossover would be OK, I think.

If the crossover is before the optical output surely you will just get the subwoofer or main amp feed, not both?

As above, you would need multiple inputs from the PC to the amp to manage that and the crossover set just on the sub one.

Two facts I know:
-Software does exist to do what you want, I’ve read of it before
-As you know you can indeed output up to 6 pre-crossed over signals to your amp, providing all is setup correctly. .

What I don’t know is what the software is called or how.

I am not sure how you could set crossover over a SPDIF connection.
Sure if you were using 6.1 out from the PC to the AMP but I thought the AMP dealt with crossover for SPDIF etc.

I also don’t see how you could use the AMP as PowerAMP as then there would be nothing to converts the digital SPDIF signal to analogue.

What AMP is it? You should be able to adjust crossover in the settings.
Or maybe I’m missing the point entirely.

Is it for music?

If so Foobar might have just the plugin for this
http://xover.sourceforge.net/

There are also a bunch of plugins to expand stereo to multi channel and so on and you can chain them together.

This is all most excellent stuff. Sorry I didn’t get back yesterday, was tad busy.

The plan is to use a software driver/x-over so that all the stereo signals are not sent out as stereo, but are modified before output to become 2 or 3 frequency bands and then sent out over the S/PDIF as 4 or 6 channels. The amp is a Cambridge azur 540R v2, which has a built-in DAC. So it’s going to be used a 4/6 channel amplifier from the digital input in alone, making it pretty much a poweramp – I’m guessing the PC will have to handle all the controlling, which brings up the issue of fan noise, but that’s not the most pressing issue.

The foobar2000 plugin probably would work, but is presumably limited to working only when I play files using foobar, not DVD’s from VLC or gaming or whatever.

Anyone else have any ideas how I can do that?

PS – yes I know a few things come up if I google it, but very few people are using such a solution, and I would love to hear from anyone here who has or might be able to guide me to setting it up as well. I have a very limited internet connection so don’t want to download huge programs and or break my windows install and have to reinstall everything – it took me 75 hours to download DOOM!!