During our recent vacation, I happened to hear rear speakers on a 5.1 surround sound system and was intrigued by it. I’m not an audiophile nor do I have a home theater system. I do have a TV and a sound bar in our living room. So I decided to try out a Vizio 38 inch sound bar
After hooking everything up, I only heard stereo sound and was confused as to why I didn’t hear surround sound even though I read that Netflix (my test content) had 5.1 surround sound content. I read a bit about this and saw that there were settings in the Roku box to turn on Dolby Digital and DTS. The sound bar handles DTS and Dolby Digital, but not Dolby Digital+. I chose Dobly Digital+ and DTS only as it was close enough. Still no go; I started futzing with the TV as I had also read that my TV (a Vizio) did pass through of audio, so the Roku should pass the audio to the TV and then to the sound bar via the optical out.
My TV had PCM and Bitstream audio out. I had never heard of Bitstream, but the TV was set to PCM, so I chose Bitstream. I went back to Netflix on the Roku and magically I saw content have a 5.1 badge next to it! It was a miracle (OK, not quite). I played some content and it was pretty cool to hear the audio behind me as well as the sound through the subwoofer.
So, it appears that anyone that wants to have a home theater work properly or just have surround sound needs to learn a new language (audio encoding/encoding) as well as futz with all the settings. My guess is that there are only a small percentage of people with these systems that actually have them working properly.
(Another part of this puzzle was getting the TV shows we record to properly export them and preserve the audio encoding; EyeTV’s export mechanism to MP4 converts audio to stereo even if the over-the-air format is 5.1. I did manage to figure this out, it it isn’t for the faint of heart and required a lot of futzing.)