Radeon 5770 Poor Audio Resampling / 96 KHz quality

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okashira

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 7, 2005
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Recently installed my 5770. I'm getting very poor quality playing music anytime there's resampling done. I have to set the shared audio mode to 44.1 Khz and 16 bit then my music sounds good. If this is set to 96KHz / 24 bit, it sounds noticibly worse. Tone is changed, loss of base and less "soundstage." This is unacceptable as even a crappy resampling algorithm should be nearly transparent, especially for upsampling!!!

I have some 96 KHz / 24 bit and 96 KHz / 32 bit output (lossy) tracks, and these also sound different when changing 44.1 --> 96. 44.1 still sounds better and I get nearly the same effect when changing to 96 KHz, but it does seem these sound better at 96 then the 44.1 khz tracks sampled to 96.

Performance Summary:

  • 44.1 khz music sounds great when played back in shared mode set to 44.1 / 16
  • 44.1 khz music suddenly sounds weak, tone changed and loss of bass when played in 96 khz shared mode (16 or 24 bit) Very significant change, and even a crappy resampling algorithm should not sound like this!
  • 96/24 music played back at 44.1 khz sounds fine.
  • 96/24 music sounds OK when played back at 96, but doesnt sound "right" Sounds better at 44.1
  • switching between 16 bit and 24 bit on shared mode makes a noticible difference in audio,. Should be pretty much transparent, especially on the tracks I'm playing... even if truncated.

I get the same effect on playback / shared mode at 192 KHz. Sounds like 96 KHz.

The card I replaced...my Creative X-Fi Fatality professional resampled *anything* to *anything* and it would always sound completely transparent. I could never tell the difference between 44.1, 48, 92, 192 khz from any source, be it 44.1, 48 or 96 khz. Same as between 16 & 24 bit.

This is unacceptable because this is a media centered PC, I have music at 44.1, 48 and 96 Khz. I have movies with audio tracks ranging from 44.1 khz MP3 to 96 KHz AAC to DTS tracks to TrueHD/DTS-HD lossless tracks. I cant keep switching the output format around for each movie / song I play.

Any ideas? I havent found any reports on the web similar to mine, and it seems like somthing like the would be more reported. This leads me to think that my card may be defective.... Could it be drivers...? I wonder if I should do a clean install with the X-Fi card removed from the PCI slot.
 
I didn't play with the HDMI audio of my 5870 much. I decided I didn't like it because it drops the audio stream when things stop playing and it takes time to restart it, meaning there's silence at the beginning of playback.

As for resampling you can get Windows 7 if you aren't using it. Windows 7 should be able to resample for you and do a pretty good job. Set it to 24/96 output and let it sample everything up.

If you are using it and you don't like it, or that's not an option, well maybe look at an Auzentech X-Fi Home Theater HD. It's expensive, but it resamples everything to 24/96 with the X-Fi's top notch engine. I love mine.
 
My only gripe with Windows 7 is it seems to stick to a single output frequency, much like previous iterations of Windows (kmixer) only outputed at 48KHz (of course this was not adjustable, and the quality sucked vs the new fp calculations).

While you can change the output frequency to whatever you want, 22/44/88/96/192, the number you set is the fixed output frequency for pcm, meaning all signals will be resampled to that frequency. This gave me trouble in a few games where stuttering would occur because I had sound configured to 88/24 (for music purposes).
 
Well look in to the HTHD then. It'll do the trick. I set the output to 24/96 and let it handle everything. Works great.
 
Sycraft said:
I didn't play with the HDMI audio of my 5870 much. I decided I didn't like it because it drops the audio stream when things stop playing and it takes time to restart it, meaning there's silence at the beginning of playback.

As for resampling you can get Windows 7 if you aren't using it. Windows 7 should be able to resample for you and do a pretty good job. Set it to 24/96 output and let it sample everything up.

If you are using it and you don't like it, or that's not an option, well maybe look at an Auzentech X-Fi Home Theater HD. It's expensive, but it resamples everything to 24/96 with the X-Fi's top notch engine. I love mine.
Click to expand...

I am running Windows 7. Are you saying it's Windows 7 that's doing the crappy job of resampling? Again, my X-fi before always ran 96/24 (used spdif/digital out) and the resampling was always transparant. The 5770 sounds like crap at 96/24.

Well, most of the reason I picked up a 5770 and sold my GTX 280 was so I can get proper surround sound (this is an HTPC) The last thing I expected this thing to have trouble with was simple resampling. If I just generally stick to 44.1 and 16 bit it's good enough, but I'd like to get it working right... there must be a driver problem or something?
 
Well Windows 7 should do a good job resampling, it has a high quality engine. Does sound like a driver problem to me.
 
Last time i checked my 5770 had 2 drivers for win7, one video driver one driver for sound over HDMI.
Are you using the right drivers?
 
Snufykat said:
Last time i checked my 5770 had 2 drivers for win7, one video driver one driver for sound over HDMI.
Are you using the right drivers?
Click to expand...

I uninstalled the ATI HDMI driver and manually installed the REALTEK HDMI driver for the card. Both proved the same performance, however the realtek driver was superior in that it provided a constant PCM stream to my receiver when there was no audio, solving a separate annoyance.

to answer your question - yes I'm using the correct driver and i reccomend the realtek driver.
 
Just want to update this with my solution to the "problem" so there's no misinformation.

It turns out the card's / windows resampling was just fine and tranparent - rather, the "problem" was my Onkyo SR-606 A/V receiver. My reciever apparently does not support the use of Audyssey when Multi Channel PCM HDMI audio is used over 48000 Hz samplerate and 24 bit.

What was happening, was when I switched from 44.1 khz to 96 khz, my reciever was simply turning off Audyssey and thus not appying the Audyssey DSP to the audio stream because it didn't support processing of that stream.

The difference I was hearing was simply the turning on and off of Audyssey... and it sounds better with it on!


My solution was to
1.) use 5.1 ch output of PCM 48000 Hz and 24 bit for the regular "shared" output mode.
2.) download the WASAPI plugin for foobar 2000 which enabled foobar to stream 96khz / 24 bit audio when such a song was played - in 2 channels. (Audyssey still supports processing of 96 khz 2 ch audio.)

These two changes meant Audyssey was working at all times, and I was getting full 96 khz fidelity when playing such music in foobar.
 
Ahh. Glad to hear you figured it out. That'd do it for sure, Audyssey is just damn amazing in the improvement it makes in the sound.

Sounds like you should start budgeting for a newer receiver. The new ones can do Audyssey on all channels at 96kHz (probably at 192kHz too). I don't know that 96kHz makes all that much difference, but there is something to be said for just having everything upsampled and not having to mess with it.

Something else to consider, if your cash flow is sufficient, is looking at a MultEQ XT receiver. Generally only the higher end ($1000 and up) ones have it, but it is a higher resolution of MultEQ and gives better results.
 
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