Hello everyone, I am trying to find the best way to set up an outdoor theater system. I am completely unfamiliar with how everything works these days now that we have switched HDCP. Here is my situation, I have a system comprised entirely of Pro Audio amps speakers and subs that I would like to use for a 5.1 system. However, it seems that getting all that uncompressed audio goodness out to my amps is just about impossible to do, I would be fine with running plan old DTS or Dolby if it would simplify things but I don't know if that is an option anymore with the new lossless encrypted tracks.
For the sake of simplicity, I would like to just have a plain old blu ray player that has audio outs like an OPPO but without the $500 price tag. (Both of my current blu ray players have absolutely no form of analog out, not even stereo!) I saw an excel doc on here of all the different audio options on Blu Ray players over the years but many of the ones that had 7.1 analog outs where either gone or earned horrible reviews. The second option I would love to do would be to set up a laptop with an external soundcard to my amps, however with HDCP, I am completely clueless as to how to find a soundcard that will do this, if there are any. It seems that most people simply want a way to pass the digital signal from their computer to their receiver and are happy with that. However, since I am using PA amps, the signal will have to be turned to analog first. The second option I have seen people do is use a high quality soundcard to decrypt the signal and send the 6 or 8 channels of audio in bitstream out to DAC's for conversion to analog, but this is expensive.
Is it possible anymore to just run plain old compressed DTS or DD on a blu ray or does it all have to be encrypted lossless?
Can you recommend one of the older style Blu Ray players that has 5.1 or 7.1 audio out for my needs, I am fine with grabbing one on ebay if it does what I need.
I am honestly so confused at this point that I am just ready to download torrents of my Blu Ray movies because I don't see how to get the discs and players to do what I want. I would very much prefer NOT to do this for legality sake as well as for the overall quality but I am at my wits end.
Budget is very important for us as this is simply an outdoor system and I already have some very good speakers, subs and amps, I just need to get the signals to them as cheaply as possible.
BTW, can I just send out a big thank you to all those genius's in the industry who gave us the system we have today! They really found a successful way to stop people from pirating their content while enabling their paying customers to enjoy everything they purchased without any complications or confusion.
