Interfacing ASIO to HDMI to drive a 5.1 system from a DAW in realtime

August 10, 2013 2:28 PM

I have Propellerhead's Reason connected to ASIO4all. I want to stream at least four channels via HDMI to a 5.1 receiver for surround-sound monitoring. Is this fairly straight-forward plug-n-play nowadays, or does it require some fiddling? What receivers would your recommend?

I do not own a receiver yet as I am still in the research stage. I do not want to sink a lot of money into this stage.

I cannot go the musicians gear route, a multi-channel interface like the Akai EIE Pro, because my Laptop runs Vista with 4 gig RAM and USB. Apparently I need a minimum of USB 2.0 to run current interfaces without glitching.

Also, I would appreciate any other ideas on getting a minimum of four discrete line outs from a DAW on a budget with an old laptop, including out of production hardware.

Background: I need a new laptop, no doubt, but I would like to hang on to this one for another 18 months or so.

posted by Ardiril to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I can't speak to the main part of your question, but are you saying that your laptop has an HDMI out? USB 2.0 precedes HDMI by a few years, so a laptop with HDMI and USB 1.x sounds a little strange.
posted by Standard Orange at 10:59 PM on August 10, 2013

Response by poster: You are right. I misread the Device Manager listing.

That solves a moderate problem, but I still have a DAW combatting audio interface drivers for resources. That's why I was hoping the drivers for the HDMI section demand significantly less via streaming.

Also, realtime isn't necessary if I can playback with Audacity.
posted by Ardiril at 3:46 AM on August 11, 2013