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Mike Peel · May 24, 2005, 01:27 PM

Does anyone know of external (USB) surround sound cards which are compatible with Mac OS X? All the ones I can see say that they work with Windows, but say nothing about macs.

tooki · May 24, 2005, 05:51 PM

M-Audio makes several.

One of the ones from Creative Labs works, too, but I don't remember its name, and with the frequency that C.L. updates its models, it's probably already discontinued.

tooki

thereubster · 07:22 PM

get a M-Audio one, they have good OSX support, however do you need digital or analog outputs for your 5.1 system? Cos the cheap M-audio stuff (like the theatre or Transit) only have digital outs for 5.1, analog is stereo only.
Dont touch Creative stuff for a mac, they wont support it, period.

wuzup101 · 02:03 AM

The M-audio sonica theater has digital coaxal output in addition to analogue outputs for up to 7.1 surround sound. It's a great card on paper (spec wise) and sounds very good (hooked up to my logitech z5500 speakers). This being said, it makes my powerbook freeze whenever I plug it in. This happened somewhere in the update from 10.3.5 to 10.3.6 or 10.3.7. I have not yet been able to resolve the problem, and google searches turn up people with similar results. I have tried M-audio's newest drivers (along with all the other ones I can find) and none of them help. The only way I can recover from this freezing, which freezes everything except the mouse cursor, is to do a hard restart. The card then works perfectly upon restart. Obviously you can see the problem drives me crazy because my machine is a frequently traveled with laptop. If I had a mac desktop I would definitely recomend this card. However, until M-audio releases a driver set that does not have this problem I can not recomend the card.

Also I should note that I'm somewhat of a mac newbie, this is my first mac. However, I'm well read on the subject, and very good on the PC side. I've tried all the usual paths and no such luck. Some posters on other forums have seemed to have luck w/ home brewed modified M-audio drivers. Also, note that this problem also arises with the transit external card.

Edit:

Writing this got me a little pissed thinking about the $70 I dropped on the sonica theater and the $300 set of speakers it's connected to that I haven't been using a lot lately due to this problem. It seems that if you just uninstall all of M-audio's crappy drivers the device works perfectly. Finally there are no odly timed delays, crackles, pops, and it doesn't completely drop short system sounds. Oh, and yeah it doesn't freeze my powerbook. The downside: I can't use the sonica theater software. Why I don't care: The z5500s are being run digitally through the coaxal output on the sonica theater... and the z5500s have all the necessary decoders and such on board and sound great..

jasong · May 27, 2005, 03:40 PM

I've got the regular Sonica USB (5.1 surround). It sounds great, but be aware that M-Audio has not yet updated the driver for Tiger, although you can trick Tiger into using it through a convoluted process (that mercifully sticks through plugging and unplugging the device but does get forgotten during a reboot).

wuzup101 · May 31, 2005, 03:32 AM

Eh... yeah even without the drivers the damn card froze my powerbook again tonight... though there still is no popping or skipps like w/ the m-audio drivers. I really wish I could use this sound card to it's fullest potential...

jasong · May 31, 2005, 06:50 AM

The Sonica Driver 1.04 has been released with Tiger compatibility. If you go to m-audio's web site, look under the Transit for the driver, not under Sonica (someone made a boo boo).

I can honestly say I have never had a freeze, crash, pop, or delay using my Sonica with the standard driver.

Scooterboy · May 31, 2005, 07:51 PM

Which Mac do you need the soundcard for? Which speaker set are you using? Do your speakers have an on-board Dolby Digital and/or DTS decoder? I'm asking because if your speaker system includes an on-board decoder and an optical port, all you need is the USB Transit. If not, then the following applies:

Currently for the Mac, there is no 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 external USB soundcard that decodes DD 5.1 or DTS 6.1. Neither are there any software DVD players for OS X that correctly decode these multichannel streams. The M-Audio Sonica Theater is a good product, but the drivers could be better. That said, the sound quality is excellent and the virtual surround sound is very convincing, but for true Dolby Digital or DTS surround, you'll need to use an external decoder with the the Sonica Theater, or USB Transit. The only stand alone decoder that I know of is the Creative Labs DDTS-100. You need to hook up the DDTS-100 to the Sonica Theater's digital out port via a digital coxial cable, or the USB Transit's digital out port with an optical TosLink cable. The DDTS-100 accepts either. It ships with a switch box allowing you to bypass the decoder or use it with the press of a button.

Once again, the M-Audio products do not decode DD or DTS. You need an external decoder and the extrernal M-Audio soundcard.

Griffin Technologies is debuting a FireWire 5.1 soundcard for Mac. The FireWave will decode Dolby Digital 5.1 and will support OpenAL (3D sound for games).

The newest drivers (for 10.3.9) for the M-Audio Sonica Theater support OpenAL and CoreAudio, and they do correct the system sounds bug. They do still freeze the Mac when doing some tasks such as switching speaker sets while in use.

MaxPower2k3 · May 31, 2005, 07:58 PM

Originally Posted by Scooterboy

Once again, the M-Audio products do not decode DD or DTS.

So this M-Audio page is incorrect?

supports DTS output and Dolby Digital 5.1/EX (6.1 DVD) decoding

Scooterboy · May 31, 2005, 09:30 PM

The M-Audio page is vague and that's where much of the confusion starts. I was confused, so I emailed them. M-Audio Support confirms that these products do not decode DD or DTS. They support it by passing through encoded streams to an AV Receiver, external decoder, or speakers with built-in decoders. They also support and will route correctly the decoded DTS or DD streams from PowerDVD, which is a Windows DVD player app that decodes in software, and other DVD player apps that can decode in software, available only for PC running Windows.

The only app for Mac OS X that decodes in software is VLC, but I haven't got it to properly route the correct channels to the correct speakers on my 5.1 Klipsch system. Maybe it works with 7.1 systems, but M-Audio support for VLC is dodgy at best, and I understand that Apple isn't very helpful either.

Scooterboy · May 31, 2005, 09:38 PM

So the only external soundcard for Mac that decodes DD (but not DTS) is the not yet released Griffin FireWave. Sorta sucks, but support for multichannel sound on OS X is far behind that on Windows. I keep putting off buying the Creative decoder, because of the price and fuglyness. But I might order it soon. The virtual surround from the Soncia Theater is really good, but for DVD's nothing beats real DD 5.1 EX or DTS.

wuzup101 · May 31, 2005, 11:10 PM

I should mention again that all of the "freezing" that I experienced was in 10.3.9 not in tiger. It started somewhere around the 10.3.5 or .6 update and yes I do have the latest drivers. I recently updated to tiger (read: an hour ago when my ADC materials finally reached me) and the first time I plugged in the Sonica theater it worked perfectly. Didn't bother installing the m-audio drivers which seem to cause more problems. I'll keep you updated.

BTW, when all is working well, the logitech z5500 w/ sonica theater setup sounds amazing. The amout of sound those speakers throw is amazing... have them hooked up via digital coax.

Scooterboy · Jun 14, 2005, 03:04 AM

Videolan.org just released VLC 0.8.2 (beta) and I'm now getting real DD 5.1 multichannel out of my Sonica Theater and Klipsch 5.1 Ultras! VLC decodes in software and it works. So no need for me to buy an external decoder or the FireWave. DVD movies sound amazing and with real 5.1 my Klipsch speakers sound much, much better!