Had two questions today of people looking for a small standalone device to do Dolby, DTS , and PCM decode down to analog stereo.

I thought this problem would go away with most of the flagship AV receivers providing a analog stereo downmix from any digital audio source. However it seems one of the popular brands dropped this feature.

I know of a Creative Labs standalone decoder (DDTS1000) for $149, but the form factor is not too cool and there are too many buttons and crap.

Other recommendations?

If one of the popular brands drops this, stop using them when an analog signal is needed. Or maybe stop using them at all! If this is a "flagship" receiver, which to me means more than, say, a minimum of $1500, well, what the heck do they do for a second zone signal? Or is this audiophile stuff?

Come on, tell us what it is. They won't bite you.

I'm not sure what price range you are looking for, but for audiophile systems, this is one of my favorite applications for old Meridian 565 decoders. There are lots of them for sale out there and with the newest firmware chip, do DTS.

Full RS-232 control and feedback if you need it too.

...or any other old outdated surround processor will probably do. Given the resale value of previous gen processors, you can get as cheap as your willing to go.

I have not used the unit so this is second hand information, but the flagship I am refering to is the Marantz SR9600. My intel source tells me that the analog outputs will not output a stereo downmix of a DD or DTS program, and that he confirmed it with Marantz.

The other situtation I run into is the fact that my matrix switches currently only handle digital audio. In several applications, customers have wanted to use only a flat panel in the 2nd through 4th zone. Sending only digital audio to that zone causes the need for a decoder, and ideally something that can be hidden behind the flat panel.

Another possible solution would be if there was a flat panel I could recommend that has a decoder built in, but I'm not sure that exists.

the digital audio switcher that I have used in the past is the FCP DigiMax... which is a really cool card based matrix swticher. will do everything from coax, EIAJ (Lightpipe too), AES/EBU, and TDIF with some optional modules for routing withing.

what you could do in such a setup is to place the Meridian as an output on the matrix, then set its configuration as 2-ch downmix only. because it has digital audio outputs, you could feed it back into the matrix as an input. then you can send PCM stereo to any zone you want, using whatever gear you normall would have utilized for PCM decoding.

the 1 advantage here is that you could theoretically use this process for multiple zones, but if you didn't want system limitations, you would have to have 1 processor for each zone or for each non-PCM source, whichever is the lesser number.

...and to continue... if you really wanted to get bare bones about it, you could buy something like the Cirrus Logic CS49### (not sure what the current gen chip is) evaluation / test board and just use it for this decoding application. i think that some of the evaluation boards come with SPDIF outputs too, or you might have to convert I2S to SPDIF, which is not a complicated process if you are handly with discrete circuitry, but if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can probably forget it.