Audio Source ques.

Anyway to play two audio sources thru the same set of speakers without Multi-room? I like to listen to Music from my PC and play Xbox at the same time. I know the Xbox plays music but I have to put the Xbox in stereo which kills my games in 5.1.

If you have the xbox getting the music from your PC using Media Player why would you have to set your processor to stereo? The music still gets played in stereo but the game info is still output in 5.1.

At least that's been my experience with it.

Are we talking xbox 360 here?

Two audio sources can't be actively input at the same time. You can have an audio input active while watching a different video input (select the video input first, then change to an audio only input like CD, Aux, Tape, Phono, or Tuner), but you'll only be listening to one thing.

Damn, my cheap Pionner did that .. on well. Thanks anyways. Something to add to the suggestions list

Playing two sources at once when both are stereo analog is relatively straightforward, but when you start mixing audio formats (as you are bound to do when dealing with a modern surround sound setup) would be very complicated.A CD will be PCM stereo, which doesn't require decoding by the DSP prior to surround processing, but I would expect mixing two PCM digital signals outside the DSP will take some additional hardware. Your Xbox360's games are playing back as a Dolby Digital bitstream (hence the 5.1 sound), so the processor has to decode that into raw multichannel PCM before applying other DSP. That means it can't be mixed with something else outside the DSP, so you would need a DSP with multiple inputs and the ability to mix those inputs downstream of decoding. And that doesn't even address issues with audio levels (DVD's are mixed lower than CD and broadcast TV to preserve headroom), which will require some sort of system to manage unless you want to be at the mercy of individual sources.

Bottom line: I may be missing something, but I don't see how it would even be possible to mix multiple audio inputs in a surround processor without significant cost and complexity.

Why not just buy a boombox and play the music through it. With the game makin all the racket you won't notice the sonic loss anyway.

OK thanks . I just sucked it up and listen to the music in Dolby. Oh well doesnt matter anyways with the noise from the game.

Yeah and last time I checked the sound coming from my speakers when my preamp was in Dolby Digital mode, the Xbox was playing the music streaming from the PC in stereo only, in other words it didn't matrix the audio information to make it play in 5.1 as well. YMMV