What happened to nVidia Soundstorm audio?

[montypythizzle]

Bring it back nVidia.
Listening to it on my old NF2 board and it sounds AMAZING.
It seems as if it is being amplified?!?!?
nVidia would make a killing if they sold a nice card for ~35 dollars they would beat the brains out of Creative's CRAP.
Please nVidia, make some money and sell me this product!!!

 

[ViRGE]

Soundstorm is dead, it's not coming back. PC audio has been turned in to a commodity thanks to Vista.

 

[montypythizzle]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Soundstorm is dead, it's not coming back. PC audio has been turned in to a commodity thanks to Vista.

SAY IT ISN"T SO!!!!

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Soundstorm is dead, it's not coming back. PC audio has been turned in to a commodity thanks to Vista.

Interesting how a decision by NVIDIA in 2002 to kill a high-performance audio controller on all future chipsets was influenced by an operating system that wouldn't be released for another four years in November 2006.

The truth is, SoundStorm was killed because there wasn't enough interest in it. And by 'interest' I don't mean "Wow, that is neat."

SoundStorm was doomed in no small part by NVIDIA's decision to let board-makers use mediocre consumer-grade audio codecs such as the ALC650.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Soundstorm is dead, it's not coming back. PC audio has been turned in to a commodity thanks to Vista.

Interesting how a decision by NVIDIA in 2002 to kill a high-performance audio controller on all future chipsets was influenced by an operating system that wouldn't be released for another four years in November 2006.

The truth is, SoundStorm was killed because there wasn't enough interest in it. And by 'interest' I don't mean "Wow, that is neat."

SoundStorm was doomed in no small part by NVIDIA's decision to let board-makers use mediocre consumer-grade audio codecs such as the ALC650.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not saying that Vista killed it, I'm saying with Vista out there's absolutely no reason to bring it back.

Probably the biggest thing to kill it actually was Creative buying Sensaura.

 

[fuentefan]

isn't Soundstorm in the original XBOX? On my modded xbox, I can set "output to all speaker" and my receiver is getting a full dolby digital signal.

 

[zig3695]

soundstorm wasnt that great. at the time, onboard audio solutions were terrible.

 

[masteraleph]

Originally posted by: zig3695
soundstorm wasnt that great. at the time, onboard audio solutions were terrible.

Soundstorm was excellent for the single reason that it was capable of encoding DD.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: masteraleph

Originally posted by: zig3695
soundstorm wasnt that great. at the time, onboard audio solutions were terrible.

Soundstorm was excellent for the single reason that it was capable of encoding DD.

It isn't encoding DD it is encoding TO DD

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: masteraleph

Originally posted by: zig3695
soundstorm wasnt that great. at the time, onboard audio solutions were terrible.

Soundstorm was excellent for the single reason that it was capable of encoding DD.

Which some boards are capable of doing now, though they'll charge you out the nose for it.

 

[zig3695]

Originally posted by: masteraleph

Originally posted by: zig3695
soundstorm wasnt that great. at the time, onboard audio solutions were terrible.

Soundstorm was excellent for the single reason that it was capable of encoding DD.

true

 

[bigpow]

there was a rumor about NV making PCI sound card using soundstorm chips, that was 3yrs ago
I like to think that their engineers got p!ssed off by the sales decision making sales people, and they left/joined another company - seems to be the norm for these high-tech companies

 

[Acanthus]

The main reason i liked soundstorm (on the boards that didnt use ALC650 or other low quality realtek codecs) was it had the price tag of onboard sound, but competed with creative for quality. The DD encoding was an added bonus.

Intel is kind of bringing back the initiative in a half assed way with azalia, but its not nearly as good.

 

[Operandi]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
SoundStorm was doomed in no small part by NVIDIA's decision to let board-makers use mediocre consumer-grade audio codecs such as the ALC650.

 

[ForumMaster]

SoundStorm is indeed good. My dad's Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe has it and i can certianly hear the difference from my crappy onboard ALC650.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
SoundStorm is indeed good. My dad's Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe has it and i can certianly hear the difference from my crappy onboard ALC650.

Umm...the A7N8X-E Deluxe used Realtek's ALC650 codec. The APU still needs a codec for the external input/output side since it doesn't build-in its own. Some implementations sounded worse than they had to due to poor attention to circuit design affecting the codec side of things (PCB). But even in a 'clean' design, users often found the ALC650 lacking compared to much better codecs used on sound cards.

 

[Arcanedeath]

If you used the Digital out you bypassed the Realtec chipset, thus better sound , using the analog ports and you had pretty crapy onboard sound for the most part.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
If you used the Digital out you bypassed the Realtec chipset, thus better sound.

The ALC650 supported digital out via S/PDIF. Anyway, digital is digital.

 

[montypythizzle]

IDK it sounded amped for some reason, like twice or even triple my AV-710s power.
I really liked the APU, it was like Creative, but on-board!!! and free