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Hi all.. Couldn't find a post on this topic so here goes...

I have recently acquired a new 5.1 cinema set-up, centred around the Denon AVR-3808 receiver, and want to make full use of the HD audio capabilities. I listen to music a fair bit on this system, streamed from my PC or via a portable hard drive, but the mp3 compression is not doing my set-up any justice. I've scoured the web and found a few sites that offer full 5.1 HD audio tracks in various formats - DTS, Dolby digital, 96kHz/24-bit PCM, WMA lossless etc (iTrax.com is one such site). However having downloaded these I find I can't play the lossless versions on my Denon (even though it is supposed to beable to decode WMA lossless).  I also have an Xbox 360 and a PS3 connected up, neither of which seem to beable to handle the lossless formats.

Does anyone out there know how I can get these formats to playback via the receiver (ideally directly streamed from a network hard drive as this is where I would store these huge files) - or do I need another piece of Media hardware to do the job??

 Thanks!

What are you streaming the WMA lossless files from?

I've used my xbox360 with WMA lossless before though.... 

Do the WMA files have DRM on them?

Maybe try transcoding to a different filetype and see if that works?

(I'm gonna stop blurting out now and wait till you're back online) 

Hi Octopo, thanks for your response. Apologies, but I'm based in Hong Kong so had to loggoff and go to sleep!

In reply to your questions, the site claims the tracks are indeed DRM free and can be saved and transferred between my different units.

Having saved them to my PC laptop hard drive I have tried streaming (wirelessly) to the Xbox 360 (which has a physical connection to my network), but the tracks only played in stereo format (I have an optical connection between the amp and the Xbox - could this be the reason for stero only output?)

 I then saved them to a USB drive which I plugged directly into the Xbox. In this set-up the tracks played, but at an extremely slowed down rate.

 Thanks

Have you been into the system settings on the xbox and changed the output to WMA digital (or whatever it is, I can't remember but it's the last option in the list)?

Your Denon may claim to be able to play WMA lossless, but there are different ways of encoding the files. I would try transcoding to WAV as it will almost certainly be able to play these.

yes - i have tried changing the output to WMA digital.. didn't work unfortunately.

I'm going to sound dim here but how would i go about transcoding the file into a WAV file?

I'm on a mac myself but this seems to encode 5.1 WMA for free. It's Microsoft media encoder and it's free if you've got XP SP2. I'm not sure about vista:

Here

 If it doesn't work, you may need to pay a little fee for some cheap software.

Just to be clear, have you tried streaming over filetypes like MP3 etc? If mp3 doesn't work you don't need to go through this transcoding process because it's no the WMA's

thanks for your help, will give this a try.

yes regular mp3s stream and playback fine.

No amount of fiddling with file formats/output settings seems to work. I contacted a Denon rep in the UK who suggested that only files of 44.1kHz speed could be played back by the Denon directly, whereas my downloads are 96kHz.

I tried to use the transcoder but it failed because I don't think it can convert 96kHz audio files. At the moment I think my only option is to burn the files onto DVD-A and then playback on the xbox or PS3 (although this isn't guaranteed to work either).