K7S5A onboard sound

[spoma]

Does the ECS k7s5a onboard sound support four speakers? I have checked their website and I can't seem to find the answer. Anyone with this board know. Also, how is the sound? Thanks for input.

 

[joe4324]

No the standard Onboard Sound is AC97, its a VERY low grade sound, Suitable for *most* people who arent too demanding but I cant handle it. It doesnt support 4 speakers.

 

[spoma]

thanks. thats what i needed to know.

 

[Peter]

Just for the record, SoundBlaster Audigy is AC97 too. This is not a quality criteria, it's just an interconnect bus between sound engine aka sound chip and analog/digital mixer and crossbar, aka codec.

It's the capabilities or lack thereof in the sound engine that matters.

That said, the SiS 7012 sound _engine_ in SiS 735 chipset indeed is a very basic raw-PCM-only thing.

The latest revision of K7S5A does use a 4-channel codec, a C-Media 9738. The sound processing still needs to be done by the CPU thanks to the sound _engine_ still being the same SiS 7012.

regards, Peter

 

[bozo1]

Peter is correct. AC97 is just a standard that most all sound cards today adhere to. It can be implemented in many ways.

 

[Peter]

Exactly ... sound engines are PCI on one end and AC97 on the other. These do the sound processing and/or take raw PCM data from system main memory. The sound codecs sit on AC97, and does the final signal mixdown as well as the analog and digital sound I/O to the real world connectors.

regards, Peter