Our great sponsors
-
Cavern
Object-based audio engine and codec pack with Dolby Atmos rendering, room correction, HRTF, one-click Unity audio takeover, and much more.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Somewhat tangential, but here's a cool somewhat open-source project related to Dolby Atmos:
https://cavern.sbence.hu/cavern/
https://github.com/VoidXH/Cavern
The visualizer, which is what I was _most_ interested in (along with software decoding) is written in C# and the rendering is done in Unity -- both things I valued & thought were cool. In theory, you could build a DIY multi-channel "receiver" with this type of software if given enough audio outputs (and/or put something like Dante to use).
I explored it a bit further but it's relatively cost prohibitive, especially if you want to do something like accept HDMI input, it gets messy. AFAICT, at least when I went down this research path a few months back, even finding & getting dev kits/boards with HDMI input (of semi-recent generation) was non-trivial & pretty pricey.
Some TVs have a SPDIF output that you can connect to a D/A converter, but that's also an external box which you don't want. The thing here is that modern TVs typically have an integrated Class D amp for their speakers that has a direct I2S input for the DSP. The manufacturer doesn't bother adding in a seperate D/A chip on the board as it doesn't need it.
The good thing though is that those cheap $10 HDMI audio extractors do work if you have a playback device that outputs PCM over HDMI. As a side note those extractors are also a great way of getting 5.1 surround sound from a HTPC running Dcaenc [1] into an old pre-HDMI AVR.
1. https://gitlab.com/patrakov/dcaenc