Dolby Digital/DTS optical passthrough issue
#1
My receiver doesn't use HDMI for sound so I'm using a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro II USB optical sound adapter. My Mac is running OS X 10.8.2. When I first set up XBMC I was pleased to find that optical passthrough worked perfectly with a variety of files; the readouts on my receiver showed that it detected the encoding. This worked for several weeks.

One day when I was out of town my girlfriend said that when she started a movie there was ear-piercing static when she tried to play files. We had to re-enable two-channel analog audio to get it working again. None of the configuration was changed; the only difference was that I upgraded to 12.1 shortly before I left. Downgrading back to 12.0 didn't solve anything. I'm not even sure if the upgrade had anything to do with it. I notice that the video playback stutters when this is happening.

Any suggestions on how to debug this? The Turtle Beach website says that passthrough is not supported on this device on OS X, but this did work flawlessly for some time.

Alternatively, if anyone knows of a cheap USB adapter that is confirmed to work well with optical passthrough on a Mac, I'll take that as well
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#2
I wonder why you are using a USB-optical adapter? Don't almost all macs have optical built into the ministereo sound out port? They make cables with mini-optical on one end (to plug into the mac) and regular optical plug on the other end. As I recall, only the macbook airs don't have it?
LibreELEC 10.0.4 * ViMediaManager or TinyMediaManager | Raspberry pi 4b
Sharing media from NAS via NFS (optical out to receiver, HDMI to TV) | TV remote with CEC / Bluetooth keyboard
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#3
Good question. My machine is a hackintosh - it's an Intel DC3217YE NUC. So there's no optical out on the device itself.

I did learn something today: I wanted to see if this was an OS, hardware, or XBMC problem so I moved my ~/Library/Application Support/XMBC folder out of the way and started XBMC again. After enabling optical output and DTS/AC3, 5.1 is again working perfectly. So it's something to do with my XBMC configuration files somehow getting messed up. I'm going to inspect/bisect the configs (assuming they are in text format) to see if I can identify the culprit.
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