2020-09-10, 10:29
(2020-09-10, 00:01)auldthief Wrote: Irrespective of how many you actually have, set number of speakers to 2. Enable all pass through options. Worked for me for 2 aac files.
If you do that then all 5.1/7.1 content that is in AAC, FLAC, PCM multichannel etc. will be decoded and re-encoded (i.e. transcoded) to Dolby Digital 5.1 lossy. This means a quality loss. If your Kodi platform and AVR support HDMI 5.1/7.1 PCM you are far better to let Kodi decode and output these formats to PCM 5.1/7.1 (which requires you to set the speaker number to 5.1 or 7.1 etc.).
If you keep the speaker number to 2 when you have a 5.1/7.1 PCM-compatible system you won't get 5.1/7.1 PCM output and instead will get the option to transcode to the poorer quality, lossy, Dolby Digital format and output this transcode as a bitstream, but this will have a quality impact.
(5.1/7.1 PCM is the same audio quality as Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio - all three are lossless ways of carrying audio. The only real difference is that True HD and DTS HD MA have metadata to allow AVRs to do some additional processing in some circumstances. All are better quality than a lossy Dolby Digital output)
The main reason to run with speakers as 2 and Dolby Digital Transcode enabled is if your system can't cope with 5.1/7.1 PCM output over HDMI and you have to use a legacy 2.0/AC3/DTS connection using SPDIF/TOSLINK or the equivalently limited ARC or have a platform that can't output 5.1/7.1 PCM (some Android players for instance)
