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AMD Motherboard Audio replacement for Soundstorm

R

RobsTV

Platinum Member
As a longtime Socket A NF2 Soundstorm owner, like others I have been waiting for the next motherboards to appear for A64 with good audio. The special thing about Soundstorm was it allowed us to do 5.1 gaming over S/PDIF.

I ended up going Audigy 2 ZS for gaming. It is great, but 5.1 gaming required Analog connections. Audigy 2 ZS also supports DVD-A, so it looked good for future.

Finally saw some new motherboards were shipping with Azalia (or HDA), and originally thought that also meant DDL. Not so. While DDL does allow 5.1 gaming over S/PDIF, it is not part of HDA. Fair enough, then HDA will be used like Audigy, and gaming will be done with Analog. Heck, it still has HDA, so good for future, right?

After receiving new motherboard with HDA, it does have great audio.
Then I slap in a DVD-A, and message pops up that HDA hardware does not support DVD-A.
For Video, DVD was a step down from HD. So I thought (wrongly), that HDA would be at least as good as DVD-A, if not a step above.

Is there something I am doing wrong?
Or is HDA just a huge marketing gimmick, that is fooling customer by using High Definition in it's name?
What does HDA actually give you?
Not 5.1 gaming over S/PDIF.
Not DVD-A capability.

Hopefully someone will reply that I am an idiot, and forgot to enable bla, bla bla, then HDA will be what I was looking for.

EDIT: BTW, here it is primarily for HTPC's using mATX motherboards and cases, with available PCI slots few to none. This is why onboard audio is so important.
 
I'm still not entirely sure what "High Definition Audio" means, as used in the context of onboard audio. It doesn't seem to imply any particular (useful) feature, as you noticed. As far as I know, these days the best you're going to find for onboard sound is SB Live chips integrated on some motherboards (I think I've seen them on a MSI board or two), but in a microATX form factor...I have no idea.

If your receiver does not have 6-channel analog inputs or you want DDL for some other reason, then there are only a few options at this point. I think there are actually a (very) few onboard "HD Audio" solutions that do DDL, but I've not read much about them. Then there's the cards based on the C-media 8768+ chip (including the HDA X-Mystique 7.1, Turtle Beach Montego DDL, and the new Diamond Xtreme Sound DDL), which should be more or less similar/identical in functionality. Then, there is actually a program I ran into the other day that appears to be able to do realtime Dolby Digital encoding in software on Live/Audigy(/2) cards, however it requires use of a third party driver. Information on that is here. I tried it myself and couldn't get it working in the little time I had, but I intend to experiment with it more later - and there are several others in that thread who say that it works perfectly for them (so I'm convinced that I was just doing something wrong). You probably wouldn't be able to have DVD-A playback with those drivers (or over the digital connection), but it's an option at least...

Since you already have the Audigy 2 and it's a quite capable sound card, I would recommend first looking into that program for DDL output - if you can't get it to work or otherwise don't like it (or the drivers you have to use for it to work), then you're not out any money, only a little of your time.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning that there are cards apparently coming out in a few months supporting realtime DTS encoding, based on a newer version of that C-media chip. If the 640kbps maximum bitrate of Dolby Digital is insufficient for you, the 1.5mbps DTS streams that those cards should be able to encode, should improve upon that quite a bit. It's an option if you wanted to wait a few months to buy something (and are not happy with the software solution I provided a link to).
 
Thanks! Lot's of good info.

Audigy was actually a PCMCIA version (Audigy 2 ZS Notebook), that I used with a PCI to PCMCIA adaptor in Shuttle Socket A motherboard. It is now back in laptop. Most new A64 motherboards only have 2 PCI slots, so to use one for audio only leaves one for tuners, etc.

Hopefully nvidia's next mATX chipset (6200?) will include SoundStorm 2, or DDL.
Really thought the nvidia 6150's would have DDL, but they stuck with simply HDA (or worse) like old motherboards.
 
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