Interfaces, ADC's and Dolby Encoding...

[MrG[UK]]

Hey all!! been trying to build a bit of a semi-pro surround sound mixing suite at home and have come into a few brick walls that i cant seem to get around/have very little expertise in.

My principle idea is to create a small home based surround mixing platform that i can work on minor surround projects to a relatively okay standard. Then take the project into a professional environment to tweak so that valuable studio time is not taken up.

Ive thought long and hard about the problems of surround sound at home and the only viable solution to it that i can see is going down the Dolby Headphone Technology route. To that end i've Equipped myself with a Pioneer SE-DIR2000C and ditched the wireless headphones for my high quality Wired Audio Technicas.

My question/ failing areas are....

1) do i encode to Dolby DTS in the box via plugins or do i route it via USB/Firewire to a new Audio interface that does the encoding for me. if so what Interfaces would you recommend for this (the higher quality the better).
2) do i buy a 2nd Audio Interface that accepts ADAT/ Analogue inputs up to 8 channels etc... and encodes to Dolby DTS?

My restrictions at the moment are that the Pioneer Unit only accepts Digital Optical and Coaxial. it cannot run multiple inputs at one time. It accepts Dolby DTS, AAC and PCM data.


I am kind of on a budget...
But the advantage of the 1st option is less DAC and ADC conversions(cheaper), disadvantage is incompatability with Pro Tools.

Advantage of 2nd is compatability with Pro Tools, disadvantage being 2 DAC conversions and 1 ADC conversions(more expensive).

any advice/help would be greatly appreciated!

[seansolo]

might try asking in post production...

[MrG[UK]]

cheers!

....posted!