Hi,

EVGA is known as a gaming brand, so it would make sense to support surround sound for games. Games output in PCM and can't pre-encode the stream because the sounds are on demand. As well as this, optical toslink doesn't have enough bandwidth for PCM 5.1, so the raw audio must be encoded on the fly to a compressed surround format - this is called Dolby Digital Live for Dolby and DTS connect for DTS.

The recent addition of nahimic virtual surround is nice - but it's only for headphones and doesn't seem as good as Dolby Headphone or DTS Headphone:X. Currently there isn't support for users with a Dolby/DTS receiver - whether that's a 5.1 setup or a headphone amp with it's own surround processing.

So my question is - is Dolby Digital Live ever going to be supported? If not, what's the reasoning? Is it a licensing (cost) issue? A technical difficulty with porting the encoder to an XMOS core? Something else?

Thanks

The only digital output on the card is the S/PDIF TOSLINK port; which you say has too low of bandwidth to support 5.1 surround. Therefore, I think that you have answered your own question. If there are no connections on the card which support analog or digital 5.1 surround, how could you connect your receiver to the card? The RCA connectors on the card are analog RCA and not capable of digital coaxial. The card supports virtual surround, which is just crappy stereo fake surround; which most serious gamers know is worse than stereo for gaming audio enemy localization.

So, I would recommend that you treat the card as a stereo card and nothing more. The virtual surround is useless to any gamer. Any gamer who doesn't know that it is useless, hasn't tested it enough.

ty_ger07
The only digital output on the card is the S/PDIF TOSLINK port; which you say has too low of bandwidth to support 5.1 surround. Therefore, I think that you have answered your own question. If there are no connections on the card which support analog or digital 5.1 surround, how could you connect your receiver to the card? The RCA connectors on the card are analog RCA and not capable of digital coaxial. The card supports virtual surround, which is just crappy stereo fake surround; which most serious gamers know is worse than stereo for gaming audio enemy localization.

So, I would recommend that you treat the card as a stereo card and nothing more. The virtual surround is useless to any gamer. Any gamer who doesn't know that it is useless, hasn't tested it enough.

S/PDIF out supports compressed 5.1 formats such as Dolby Digital, so the card could output 5.1 from games if it had Dolby Digital Live encoding - hence my question. It can already output 5.1 if the content is pre-encoded such as films.

I am a gamer and I find the spatial differentiation to be much better on both true 5.1 and virtual than from a stereo source. My preference is 5.1 > Dolby Headphone > DTS Headphone > Nahimic > Stereo. If thousands of game hours isn't enough to have tested it then I don't know what is. In my experience downsampling any content from a high entropy source almost always yields a better result than the lower entropy baseline. In this case the source contains more spatial information so the result retains more of it - unless the game is creating the stereo source using positional information, but that in itself is just virtual surround.
 
Anyway the question has been answered below - thank you. I hope a future product will support true surround output.

I dont believe that Dolby Digital Live (DDL) has been a relevant product for a long time... DDL is simply an encoding algorithm that takes an audio signal from say a PC game and converts into a compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 signal that can than be transferred over a S/PDIF cable. As you mentioned S/PDIF only has enough bandwidth to be able to transfer either two channel PCM or compressed Dolby Digital/DTS audio. If the game in question is capable of producing a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio signal than the NU Audio card should have no issue outputting said signal. DDL would only come into play with games that are not capable of producing a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal, instead the DDL encoder would take the audio and convert it to Dolby Digital.
 
DDL essentially creates virtual surround AKA fake surround sound. While I do agree that some games do benefit from the Audio Immersion effect that virtual surround can create it is often times "muddy" at best, virtual surround IMO is more of a marketing ploy and not a substitute for real surround sound. When it comes to FPS games most people that I know actively disable virtual surround as it is near impossible to actually be able to tell where your opponent is at due to this "muddy" affect that it creates. 
 
Adding something like this to the NU Audio Card would go against its core purpose IMO and would be something that I would expect to find on a Creative Sound Card, not on a high end audiophile card. 
 

There seems to be a lot of confusion what DDL is in this thread. It is not fake surround at all. Windows DirectX written games for example, produce surround sound (positional audio) going to multiple channels, in many cases connected via multiple analog cables. DDL encodes this (true not fake) surround into dolby digital transmittable over SPDIF coaxial or optical. It has to do that, because otherwise bandwidth would not be sufficient for 5.1 or 7.1 channels. This feature comes in handy if you get interference's for example and you want digital output via optical. If a game only outputs stereo, yes, than it would be fake virtual sound. But there is many games that don't have the dolby encoding capability (the majority) but do output surround sound. If you watch a movie for example, that is already encoded, its signal is merely passed thru, so you can hear the movie in 5.1, 7.1 or whatever because the receiver will decode it. I hope this explains, that it is not a fake feature and there is actually some use for it.

Me personally I like playing via my receiver with 4 Denon SCM40 speakers around me plus 1 subwoofer (4.1 being handled by the receiver to compensate for the missing center). Alternatively i play over headphone, which would then use Dolby Headphone or something similar transforming the multiple surround channel into a 2 channel signal providing a surround illusion. Some games have support built-in for this, in other cases the card/drivers would have to handle this. But this it not a fake surround sound either, because at the end of the day, most of us have 2 ears to listen with.

If I understand the NU audio card's features correctly it does not provide these (gaming) features like DTS or Dolby Digital Encoding or Dolby Headphone, so the game would have to provide it. If the game doesn't provide it, you could connect your motherboard's digital out, if the motherboard's audio has those features. I think EVGA could license the features and put their logos on their package if they see a market for that. Windows 10 added their own headphone surround feature, called spatial sound and that should work with the NU audio if playing over headphone.