Amplifier With Digital / Optical In

[Trav33]

I'm starting to design my audio system, which will be run from a carputer. I need to make sure I have a high quality audio source to start with, and am lookin at Sound Cards which have digital or optical out signals.

Are there car amplifiers which support an optical in / digital in signal?

Would be awesome if there was a 4ch amp which had 5.1 optical decoding, and could output the second 2 channels to an attached second "slave" amp.

Or am I over exaggerating things, and analogue signals from a high quality PC sound card would be fine to send through an amplifier?

Edit : I've found one 5.1 amp, Alpine MRA-F355, with optical in and full dolby processing!

Edited January 5, 2007 by Trav33

[Trav33]

I'm still looking for an amplifier which has optical-in...

The Alpine MRA-F355 does, 5.1 channel dolby decoding, 50W x 5 channels, for around $700 (RRP is $799)

Are there any other amplifiers which have optical-in and digital decoding?

[Fhrx]

We often use the Focal Dual Monitor amplifier (it has inbuilt DSP etc) as a master and the Focal FP1.800 as a slave. However the output from master to slave is analogue (RCA). It is an optical input to the DM though.

Click here for more information.

Edited March 25, 2007 by Fhrx

[Trav33]

Wow, the Dual-Monitor looks nice, 2x250W of power. Also digital control via USB, not sure exactly what you can control...

So can it accept a 4-channel digital signal, and decode all 4 channels. 2 amplified internally, and the other 2 channels are analog (RCA) output? Or is it only decoding 2 channels? The PDF wasn't too clear...

Any idea on RRP?

[Fhrx]

To be honest I haven't experimented beyond two channel audio. I'm not sure what the amplifier would do if you feed it a 5.1 music format. It only has a two channel slave output though so you could not run another bunch of amplifiers for surround, center and subwoofer channels.

They retail at $2999.