Trying to Grasp 7.1 digital Home Theather gaming

Hi Gang,
The ultimate goal would be to have a game that used all 7.1 speakers that I have hooked up to my reciever in descrete channels. Currently all I can manage is 5.1 via DDL.

My current setup is a 46 inch TV hooked up to my reciever, an Onkyo 706 via HDMI. My PC is hooked up to the reciever sound wise via a tosslink cable. The sound card is a soundblaster X-fi titanium pro gamer fatality edition.

Now its my understanding that the tosslink cable doesn't have enough bandwidth to carry a 7.1 uncompressed stream for blueray so they released HDMI. I am not sure how that relates to gaming as most games sound is probably compressed.

I have an Nvidia gtx 480 hooked up to the reciever via mini HDMI, and I suppose I could use the passthrough technique to route the spdif digital signal to the HDMI on the video card with the proper cable, However, wouldn't that still only output a DDL 5.1 signal?

Where does eax 5.0 come into this? Is there no digital 7.1 sound card? All I can find is an analog 7.1 soundcard if I want discreate channels which means a different sound ammplifier than the onkyo reciever which defeats the whole purpose of my home theater setup.

Any and all help and or coments are welcome.

You may want to try the ASUS or HT Omega sound cards. I think thye have 7.1 over optical. HT Omega is a much better card. But they don't have a pci-e card yet.

Also I am using my nvidia gts 450 which puts surround sound (up to 7.1) directly on the hdmi cable. This is working much better than I expected. I think this is supported on all Fremi cards. I am using this with my 5.1 system which is mostly for home theater pc but I do some gaming on it too,

It uses DTS Neo to make the games surround. I haven't gotten it to work yet on blu-ray with cyberlink but it is supposed to so I am still investigating.

I had the auzentech home theater hd on my home theater and it was nothing but problems.

Your X-Fi does 7.1 surround out of the analog ports. You will be limited to 5.1 for a "toslink" connection.

If, however, you pass everything via HDMI to your receiver and your source is a 7.1 track, you should be getting 7.1 sound out of your receiver in that case. Otherwise, if your source is 5.1 or lower, your receiver would need to do some mixing to simulate 7.1 I suppose whether your software is doing the decoding or passing the raw data to your receiver may make some difference as well as different BluRay software player editions handle audio differently.

PCMusicGuy said:

Your X-Fi does 7.1 surround out of the analog ports. You will be limited to 5.1 for a "toslink" connection.

If, however, you pass everything via HDMI to your receiver and your source is a 7.1 track, you should be getting 7.1 sound out of your receiver in that case. Otherwise, if your source is 5.1 or lower, your receiver would need to do some mixing to simulate 7.1 I suppose whether your software is doing the decoding or passing the raw data to your receiver may make some difference as well as different BluRay software player editions handle audio differently.

Click to expand...

This is correct, the S/PDIF interface is limited to 6 channels of audio (and those 6 channels are already heavily compressed). To achieve the 8 channels you are looking for, you will need to use analog or HDMI. HDMI would be the preferable interconnect. With it, you can send 8 channels of LPCM which is as good as it gets.

Would this card work to give you 8 channels, and work with 7.1 sound in computer games? Would it work without problems in games like l4d2, or would the HDMI hookup cause some kind of problem?
This is also HDMI 1.3, I think they have HDMI 1.4 out now, not sure if this would do anything sound related.


http://www.amazon.com/Auzentech-AZT-XFHTHD-X-Fi-HomeTheater-Sound/dp/B002NJP6B4

Yeah that Auzentech HT card will work. Asus also makes a Xonar that has HDMI as well. There really aren't that many movies in 7.1 though, but if you have your receiver mix the 5.1 audio over 7.1 it can provide more room filling sound or add to the environment.

JohnleMVP said:

Yeah that Auzentech HT card will work. Asus also makes a Xonar that has HDMI as well. There really aren't that many movies in 7.1 though, but if you have your receiver mix the 5.1 audio over 7.1 it can provide more room filling sound or add to the environment.

Click to expand...

Its not the movies im worried about, I do watch some movies, but its the games that I want to use all 8 channels on. Halflife 2 with 8 channels would be awsome.

eddie500 said:

Would this card work to give you 8 channels, and work with 7.1 sound in computer games? Would it work without problems in games like l4d2, or would the HDMI hookup cause some kind of problem?
This is also HDMI 1.3, I think they have HDMI 1.4 out now, not sure if this would do anything sound related.


http://www.amazon.com/Auzentech-AZT-XFHTHD-X-Fi-HomeTheater-Sound/dp/B002NJP6B4

Click to expand...

Those would work but honestly I don't see why waste all that money. Personally, I would just go pick up a AMD HD5450 for about $60 and use the HDMI port on that to connect to your receiver for sound. They can output 8 channel LPCM which is what you want to use for games. As well as bit-stream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD for BluRays.

Also, practically all games should support 8 channel audio and there are a good number of BluRays that do and the list grows every day.

See this page for a comprehensive list:
http://blu-raystats.com/Stats/MovieStats.php

Just select 7.1 from the Audio drop-down.

For sources less than 8 channels, just enable Dolby ProLogic 2z and it will fill all 8 speakers.

SirMaster said:

Those would work but honestly I don't see why waste all that money. Personally, I would just go pick up a AMD HD5450 for about $60 and use the HDMI port on that to connect to your receiver for sound. They can output 8 channel LPCM which is what you want to use for games. As well as bit-stream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD for BluRays.

Also, practically all games should support 8 channel audio and there are a good number of BluRays that do and the list grows every day.

See this page for a comprehensive list:
http://blu-raystats.com/Stats/MovieStats.php

Just select 7.1 from the Audio drop-down.

For sources less than 8 channels, just enable Dolby ProLogic 2z and it will fill all 8 speakers.

Click to expand...

I have an Nvidia 480 GTX which has HDMI out as well. But the sound that I get from it seems to be clipped a lot of time, the reciever will switch codecs to match what it is outputting.

eddie500 said:

Would this card work to give you 8 channels, and work with 7.1 sound in computer games? Would it work without problems in games like l4d2, or would the HDMI hookup cause some kind of problem?
This is also HDMI 1.3, I think they have HDMI 1.4 out now, not sure if this would do anything sound related.


http://www.amazon.com/Auzentech-AZT-XFHTHD-X-Fi-HomeTheater-Sound/dp/B002NJP6B4

Click to expand...

Like I said before I had that card for a year. I really wanted it to work. But I had problems with video flashing on and off and every once in a while the sound would get garbled and I had to reboot system. Plus I never got the $40 rebate that was offered. This card worked fine for gaming. So if you are using for gaming only and you don't mind Creative drivers this card will be ok.

QuadDragon said:

I have an Nvidia 480 GTX which has HDMI out as well. But the sound that I get from it seems to be clipped a lot of time, the reciever will switch codecs to match what it is outputting.

Click to expand...

Hmm I haven't seen ( or heard ) that. I am using a Yamaha receiver.

I've got a GTX 480 and I used the HDMI out to play Dead Rising 2 on my "theater" downstairs; I connected it to my Onkyo TX-SR608 receiver and everything worked fine.

With the HDMI-out on the 480 you're gonna get 7.1 audio and it'll pass the HD formats as well but it's a Realtek chip. It'd be nice if they could come up with something to integrate the X-Fi into the HDMI so you could get the full functionality of EAX 5.0 HD in games or whatever the hell an X-Fi does.

QuadDragon said:

I have an Nvidia 480 GTX which has HDMI out as well. But the sound that I get from it seems to be clipped a lot of time, the reciever will switch codecs to match what it is outputting.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I use a GTX 480 to my Denon AVR-1910 and I haven't had any clipping or anything.

It outputs what I tell it to output. LPCM for games and BluRays and DD or DTS if a ripped movie has that.

Do the Fermi cards really use Realtek? I read that the older nvidia cards did but they were only 2.1 for hdmi.

I thought nvidia was using stream processors and software for the hdmai audio. I would like to know more about this technology. There is very little information even from nvidia.