This component is unique in that it is the only vacuum tube driven surround sound processor in the world, utilizing Dolby Pro Logic II, created by the legendary Jim Fosgate.

No shit.

I’ve been reading a lot about early surround recently. Fosgate most definitely has bragging rights as The Man. Not only did he develop the coolest decoders, he went on to design Dolby Pro Logic II and now makes crazy stuff like the 5-channel tube pre-amp shown above. Respect.

All of which is preamble to mentioning that I’ve just installed the Pro Logic II upgrade to the AV32R. It’s at least interesting and kind of fun — the surround channels are much more discrete than with Tag’s matrix system, which I’ve used a lot, so it will take a little while to get used to. And I think I need to recalibrate the speakers for it. Off to the shop for a new battery for the SPL meter…

Now that I’ve moved most of my music onto my music box, I’ve been looking at the possibility of building my own surround decoder, a fantasy which has quickly led me into a void of tools: there is very little in the way of PC hardware and open source software to help. The lack of open source software I can understand, as Dolby is obviously a proprietary format. But the dearth of hardware is more surprising — so far I haven’t been able to find a single pro or semi-pro hardware decoder card that does Dolby Digital. Creative Labs have a few Dolby-compatible cards/drivers, but they’re really designed for gaming (tiny plugs! tiny plugs!), and besides I would prefer to have the decoding and DAC functions on separate cards so I can mix and match performance and capabilities.

So for the moment I’m stuck. I haven’t really had time to play with building a software-only solution using say gstreamer, and anyway suspect that even if it worked, I would rapidly run into latency issues. Any ideas on hardware?