Radeon built-in sound quality

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XpediencY

Gawd
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Jan 12, 2008
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Has there been any reviews over the sound quality of these built-in chips versus a dedicated sound card?
 
You mean the HDMI Audio? If that's what you mean the card won't affect audio quality, it's just a transport mechanism to get digital audio to your receiver. That is where the actual decoding and digital to analog conversion will take place and thus (along with the speakers attached to it) will be the deciding factors in the quality of the sound.
 
like dust mentioned. its straight pass through audio, theres no conversion at the card level. so the audio quality is what ever device is decoding it, be it a tv, audio receiver or what ever you have connected to it.
 
NVIDIA uses a passthrough since you need to connect the wire from soundcard/motherboard onboard to the videocard.... ATI has a built in chip since the 2900 series. Recently with 7.1 support.

Unless I'm wrong
 
I think that was just older nVidia cards. I have a bottom end nVidia 210 in my HTPC and it doesn't need passthrough, just shows up as an HDMI Audio device, seems to work as expected.
 
XpediencY said:
NVIDIA uses a passthrough since you need to connect the wire from soundcard/motherboard onboard to the videocard.... ATI has a built in chip since the 2900 series. Recently with 7.1 support.

Unless I'm wrong
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Most newer Nvidia cards from the 210 up have built-in audio. Many of the 4xx series bitstream HD audio, just like the ATI cards do. The 430 and 440 are very popular HTPC cards for this reason.
 
+1 to What Dust said. To clear things:
It doesn't matter if GPU "audio chip" allows to send original bitstream or forces it to be decoded to multichannel PCM - result is the same. The only difference would if you'd have fancy logo light on the receiver.
 
BoredSysAdm said:
+1 to What Dust said. To clear things:
It doesn't matter if GPU "audio chip" allows to send original bitstream or forces it to be decoded to multichannel PCM - result is the same. The only difference would if you'd have fancy logo light on the receiver.
Click to expand...

Well if you use LPCM then you don't get the security of your receiver being able to use CRC like you do when decoding HD audio steams to ensure they are bit-perfect. Error correction is a feature of those audio codecs.

Also, some receivers cannot apply effects like Audyssesy, dynamic volume and dynamic EQ to LPCM streams, but they can to HD audio streams.
 
So I'm getting confused now. Are the audio chips on Radeons and GT210 and up essentially a sound card or is it just a passthrough?

Or are we saying that since it is a digital signal, the sound is the same as when it hits the receiver, but only changes due to the kind of speakers connected?
 
It would depend on what your definition of a sound card is.

I would say a sound card is a card that has a DAC (digital to analog converter) and an amplifier on it because that is 90% of what you are paying for when you buy a sound card.

So, an AMD or Nvidia graphics card with HDMI has neither a DAC or amplifier so I would not call them sound cards.

When you use HDMI to send the sound from your computer to your receiver via HDMI, you are using the DAC and amplifier that is inside the receiver. So by my earlier definition, your receiver would be the sound card.

Another example is when you use USB headphones. There is actually a DAC and amplifier inside the headphones. so in that case, the headphones are the sound card or contain the sound card.
 
Ah OK. That makes sense. Howbout optical from sound card to receiver? Same definition as videocards with HDMI?
 
XpediencY said:
Ah OK. That makes sense. Howbout optical from sound card to receiver? Same definition as videocards with HDMI?
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Yes, with the exception that HDMI can carry DTS-HD Master, DD Plus etc, which Optical cannot. But they are both digital signals, and for only DTS/ DD transmittion, they would theoretically be identical :)
 
Cerulean said:
How do I plug my 3.5mm Sennheisers into my HD6850?
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You can't. You would need a DAC, to get you an analog output, and then an amplifier. You could use the headphone output on a reciever, although that is basically overkill.
 
Liggywuh said:
You can't. You would need a DAC, to get you an analog output, and then an amplifier. You could use the headphone output on a reciever, although that is basically overkill.
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What products do you recommend? :D

Would like to know just out of curiosity.
 
Well I personally would have an optical cable from the soundcard (or onboard) to a DAC, maybe a (DIY) AMB Labs Gamma 1 + 2 Upgrade, and a AMB Labs M3 amplifer.

For what you want, I would probibly get an Onkyo NR609 amp, which I could use for home theater, and plug headphones into. But you are at the mercy of the quality of the DAC/ headphone output stage as for quality.
 
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