Spdif-out using stereo headphone jack

[shay_nahum]

I used to have an old sound card that was able to output spdif from a regular headphone jack that at the end of the cable had a RCA (composite) connector.



Does the hardware have enough computing power to do the conversion to spdif ?

[AlexP]

What hardware?  What do you want to do?

[shay_nahum]

simply connect my player to a receiver through spdif thus giving in higher quality.

[karashata]

A wikipedia article on S/PDIF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/PDIF

I'm not entirely sure about this, but I don't think it's possible to use the headphone output to send a digital signal to your receiver at all, never mind a S/PDIF signal... I think you'd need to have a proper digital output to even begin, and I'm not sure that just any hardware could send a S/PDIF signal out through that...

[Chronon]

The headphone jack sends out an analog signal from the DAC.  Even if you tried to fake  a digital bitstream (I doubt you could manage the voltages necessary for normal logic levels anyway) the bandwidth would be much too small to transmit audio this way.  Even if you assume that a pure sinusoid could act as a digital signal the bitrate would be capped by the maximum frequency produced by the DAC (usually close to 20 kHz).  So, you could maybe get 20 kbps even under the most naive assumptions.  I'm sure other objections exist as well.

[saratoga]

You can't put SPDIF through an audio DAC.  The bandwidth is a couple orders of magnitude too low.