Reply To: Digital Audio In

[nmalinoski]

I wouldn’t mind an addon board, but I’d still want each AV input to have a digital input as well, and for the OSSC to do input switching on the digital board. I’ve read about how the audio addon boards for the 1.5 only had one input, and that sounds too limiting. I’m also not a fan of decoupling audio from video; there will be times where I’ll have my PS2 with TOSLINK running a game, and I’ll want to use a different console on a different input, which would likely result in the audio from the PS2 playing over the video from the other console.

The OSSC might also have to determine whether it’s receiving TOSLINK audio for a given input and send only that audio to the HDMI chip, the assumption being that the digital audio is higher quality and/or has more channels than the stereo analogue audio it might also be receiving at the same time.

I’m hoping that any integration of TOSLINK I/O and switching would also come with a change in board layout. The TOSLINK I/O could very well be added to a PCB that sits where the center acrylic sits, but I’m not a fan of having I/O on three sides of a device, and especially not having to input YPbPr video on one side and audio on another.

Would be nice if all the I/O was on the back and logically grouped, so that AV1’s SCART port, the TRS audio breakout, and a TOSLINK input are together; AV2’s RCA connectors, TRS audio input, and TOSLINK input are together (Or take the opportunity to make this a 3-wide, 2-high RCA block, so we don’t need to use an RCA->TRS adapter, and make that sixth hole a full-size TOSLINK jack); and AV3’s DE-15, TRS audio input, and TOSLINK input are together.

Personally, I would advise against switching out the TRS jacks for TRS/mini-TOSLINK jacks, because users (myself included) may not be using only one type of audio source. For example, my Audio Authority 1154A component video switcher is wired for both analogue stereo and digital via TOSLINK, because not all of my component video sources will do TOSLINK (Think SNES/Genesis/Saturn/PS1/Neo Geo with HD Retrovision cables but without TOSLINK mods, or NESRGB, or GameCube without TOSLINK mod). For those who have the TOSLINK addon board for the gscartsw, they most certainly will not have 100% analogue or 100% digital audio sources. (Although, in that case, analogue audio would be carried over SCART, so, would it make more sense to have a full-size TOSLINK port AND a TRS analogue audio breakout, or force users to choose with a combo port for one of digital in or analogue out?)