Recommend an HTPC Audio Solution

madFive

madFive

metal[H]ead
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Mar 26, 2008
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I would like to replace either my Receiver or Sound Card to get a system that plays nice together. Would like to keep the budget within about $150-250 for one or both components.

Ok, here's what I have in my setup now. (My gaming rig-in-sig doubles as my HTPC.)

● X-Fi Titanium Sound Card, or Realtek onboard sound, (also had a Turtle-Beach card which worked great in XP but doesn't have good Win7 drivers),
● Yamaha RX-V367 5.1 Receiver,
● Polk Monitor 30 Speakers (x4),
● Polk CS1 Center Speaker,
● Infinity Bass System (converted my car sub) 1200w amp with 2x12" speakers in closed cabinet.

And here's the problem - I am sick to death of trying to get the S/PDIF to work correctly from my sound-card(s) to receiver. My current receiver can only take 5.1 sound through S/PDIF input or HDMI. And all the sound-cards I've tried really only work easily with the multi-plug analog outputs. Getting optical-out to send 5.1 consistently is a driver/software nightmare, and I just refuse to go through this again.

I would like either a Receiver that can take 5.1 (or 7.1) input in analog multi-inputs, or a sound card that is made to work with HTPC and has rock-solid consistent optical-output performance, and doesn't require me to install a dozen different driver modules to just get hit-or-miss 5.1 implementation (must have good Win7 drivers). Creative sound-cards are absolutely off the table - their current driver situation in Windows7 is just completely unacceptable. I want a sound-card that just has one driver to install, and everything just works once it's installed!
 
I have fallen in love with M-Audio's cards. I first got one a few years ago for a ham radio SDR project I put together, and the noise floor compared to all the other cards I had tried is FANTASTIC. I plan on putting one in every machine of mine from here on out!

The model I have is the Delta44, and has been used on XP32, Vista32, and 7-64.

enjoy!
 
The ideal solution is to use HDMI for sound and video to an HDMI-equipped receiver. It is superior to S/PDIF because it can handle multichannel LPCM (for video games and some bluray audio) and it's already carrying the video.

There is no need for a sound card with an HTPC. Either use a modern CPU with HDMI out, or get a cheap video card that supports audio over its HDMI port.
 
I cannot speak to the USB products. I would never use a USB sound card (adapter) for anything other than basic system beeps and whatnot... lol
 
wilsonite said:
I have fallen in love with M-Audio's cards. I first got one a few years ago for a ham radio SDR project I put together, and the noise floor compared to all the other cards I had tried is FANTASTIC. I plan on putting one in every machine of mine from here on out!

The model I have is the Delta44, and has been used on XP32, Vista32, and 7-64. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

I had to look this up - M-Audio makes all the Pro-Tools recording equipment etc. Looks like this card is geared more toward pro music recording (4-chanel only?) than for entertainment purposes. It doesn't have any normal audio outputs on the back, just some kind of serial port that goes to the recording device. Does it have a way to output 5.1 audio for games and movies, or what?

Valaire said:
The ideal solution is to use HDMI for sound and video to an HDMI-equipped receiver. It is superior to S/PDIF because it can handle multichannel LPCM (for video games and some bluray audio) and it's already carrying the video.

There is no need for a sound card with an HTPC. Either use a modern CPU with HDMI out, or get a cheap video card that supports audio over its HDMI port.
Click to expand...

Oh! I hadn't considered adding another video card to use for just sound - that's an interesting idea. I tried running the audio from my video card a while ago through the HDMI, but my receiver tended to do weird stuff to my video resolution before passing it on to the TV. And I was afraid of compromised video performance due to delay added by the receiver, and also the performance hit to the video card from having to process both the video and audio. Also the sound quality didn't seem as good as I was used to from the dedicated X-Fi card.

I'm kind-of surprised looking around that there don't seem to be a lot of HDMI sound cards available by now. Found one by Auzentech, but it's out of stock all over the place, and apparently it still uses the Creative X-Fi drivers, which I'd like to avoid.

Any other HDMI-out sound cards I should look into? Also, is there any difference in the audio quality that comes from various video cards? And does the audio get generated by the video card itself or does it depend on the audio processing by your CPU/MB, and just gets outputted through the video card?
 
Audio processing should be done by the CPU, and is so minimal in task it won't slow anything down. You'll never see an HDMI sound card because HDMI is a video link. That HDMI card you're talking about still needs an input video signal. It's not going to do anything more than just running sound from your video card. Are there any settings on your receiver that may screw with the video signal? HDMI is such a mess and a mistake.
 
I know the description on their site, and the pictures do not help much. I will try to give a quick $0.05 tour. the number after the Delta name refers to the number of MONO inputs/outputs. The 15 pin serialesque port on the back connects to a "breakout box". This is because they could not fit 8 - 0.25" jacks on a single card plate. (4in,4out).

So to use the card as a regular sound card, each output is a single channel. So if you want a 5.1, you would need a Delta 1010. (the Delta 66 is 4 analog and 2 digital in/outputs. the 1010 is 8 analog and 2 digital) 1 channel each for LF, CF, RF, LR, RR, and LFE for a total of 6 outputs with 2 more left over for true 7.1 if so desired. This also means that you have eight independent analog inputs. The windows driver allows you to tie two ports together so it appears as a standard L/R pair to software applications.

http://www.m-audio.com/images/global/product_pics/big/Delta44_v2008.jpg

I have opened my breakout box(Delta44), and there is NO intelligence in the box. It only takes the 15pin connector to the 8 separate jacks (4in/4out) via a well laid out PCB. The jacks are standard 1/4" mono tip/ring (old headphone style) jacks. So for stereo, you would need to get a Y-cable from Ratshack or equiv to tie the two monos into a single stereo connection. The umbilical is fully shielded, and since the box is metal therefore, it is fully shielded as well.

So without being too long winded, a delta44 is 4 totally separate, independent, single channel analog sound cards 1 input, 1 output each. There is very little crosstalk between the channels.

If you are interested I can try to post screenshots of a waterfall spectrum analyzer showing typical noise floor from mainstream pc sound cards, and the m-audio. (I have to see if I can find them) The quick and dirty is, the only noise picked up from the delta card, is from the SDR radio I had connected to it. when power was removed from the radio, the waterfall is almost totally black.

I hope this helped as opposed to hinder.
Wilsonite
 
madFive said:
● X-Fi Titanium Sound Card, or Realtek onboard sound, (also had a Turtle-Beach card which worked great in XP but doesn't have good Win7 drivers),
● Yamaha RX-V367 5.1 Receiver,
● Polk Monitor 30 Speakers (x4),
● Polk CS1 Center Speaker,
● Infinity Bass System (converted my car sub) 1200w amp with 2x12" speakers in closed cabinet.

Creative sound-cards are absolutely off the table - their current driver situation in Windows7 is just completely unacceptable. I want a sound-card that just has one driver to install, and everything just works once it's installed!
Click to expand...

What drivers have you tried with the X-fi Titanium? I have the Titanium HD version and quickly realized just how crappy their drivers are. did a bit of research and found PAX. They pretty much are the only people supporting/fixing the creative driver bugs

Try downloading Driver sweeper, uninstall all your creative drivers/programs through Add/Remove and Driver sweeper and do a clean install of their Master audio suite and driver.

I remember reading a post on their forum about how they got S/PDIF to function correctly on several models (Forgot which ones). It's worth a try before spending money.
 
NoTrigger said:
What drivers have you tried with the X-fi Titanium? I have the Titanium HD version and quickly realized just how crappy their drivers are. did a bit of research and found PAX. They pretty much are the only people supporting/fixing the creative driver bugs

Try downloading Driver sweeper, uninstall all your creative drivers/programs through Add/Remove and Driver sweeper and do a clean install of their Master audio suite and driver.

I remember reading a post on their forum about how they got S/PDIF to function correctly on several models (Forgot which ones). It's worth a try before spending money.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at those. I did get the X-Fi working at about 80% on my last build, but it was a massive pain and I really don't want to go through that again. There's over a half-dozen different drivers and software packages on the creative site that you have to install to get the S/PDIF to work at all in Win7, and even then my sound only worked with 5.1 and bass during gaming and BR/DVD playback. I never did get it to play bass with my music or online streaming media etc, which really isn't acceptable. I'd like my speakers to work all the time, not just in a few modes that happen to be compatible.

I just re-installed windows, and haven't installed the creative card yet. So no drivers to un-install at this point. I tried the S/PDIF out on my new P67 board, but it looks like I can't get 5.1 through that either...

I think I'm going to try running the HDMI through my receiver one more time, then I may try the X-Fi one more time before I decide to move on to another solution.
 
Let's go over some basics...

If you are listening to a stereo source, only your front two speakers will play the sound unless you impose some kind of upmixing software that is going to take a 2.0 source and fake a multichannel sound from it. So if you set up your speakers correctly, they should only be playing surround sound on sources that actually have surround sound--think Dolby Digital, DTS, and raw multichannel LPCM.

If you want your music to play back in 5.1 (this is not common or intended for music encoded in stereo), for analog connections, you can either use a plugin for the player itself (Foobar has a Channel Mixer that can upmix), or you can set it in the sound card driver. I believe Creative has 3 different upmix modes, one of them just being a stereo mirror on the back speakers.

As I mentioned previously, however, there is no need to invest in a soundcard if you have a modern PC with an HDMI port. Just connect an AVR to the PC via HDMI. That's your best and most versatile digital connection for sound (and video). Once that is set up, your AVR itself will be the way to upmix stereo content to multichannel. Dolby Prologic I/II and DTS Neo:6 are the modes to fake surround with varying degrees of success for music, movies, and television. Your receiver will take in the 2.0 content from online streaming media or your music, and upmix it when you enable those modes.
 
wilsonite said:
I cannot speak to the USB products. I would never use a USB sound card (adapter) for anything other than basic system beeps and whatnot... lol
Click to expand...

Why is this? Three are some really excellent DACs that have USB input. The digital stream is untouched so what is the problem? The benchmark series are a good example that USB can do a perfect job as an audio transport system.

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/dac/dac1-pre
 
I would sell your video card and sound card and buy a video card with HDMI output that can bitstream audio.
 
SirMaster said:
Why is this? Three are some really excellent DACs that have USB input. The digital stream is untouched so what is the problem? The benchmark series are a good example that USB can do a perfect job as an audio transport system.

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/dac/dac1-pre
Click to expand...

Absolutely. If you are only interested in 2-channel sound to an amp or reciever, then this: http://www.amazon.com/HRT-Music-Str...4UFQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323302355&sr=8-1 will blow away just about any sound card out there.
USB can be very, very good if done correctly.
 
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wilsonite said:
I have fallen in love with M-Audio's cards. I first got one a few years ago for a ham radio SDR project I put together, and the noise floor compared to all the other cards I had tried is FANTASTIC. I plan on putting one in every machine of mine from here on out!

The model I have is the Delta44, and has been used on XP32, Vista32, and 7-64.

enjoy!
Click to expand...

I agree, bought this one a number of years back for $50 for a while they didn't upgrade their drivers, but now I have one for win 7 64 bit.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829121122

The sound is great... surely the OP can use SPDIF or optical from motherboards onboard sound to receiver though? I have this soundcard in my PC because I have it and the sound is better than onboard, but it is fairly imperceptible
 
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Valaire said:
Let's go over some basics... <snip>
Click to expand...

K - I tried running the audio over HDMI from my GTX570 through AVR to TV last night, and the video was fine. However, I really wasn't impressed with the audio. Highs were nice and crisp, but mids were a bit distorted and weak, and the bass was horrible. Got a lot of humming over the bass channel and generally not the punch I am used to hearing from my sub.

And the same problem was still present on Stereo streams. I don't necessarily want these to play in 5.1, but I do want the bass frequencies of the music to play through my Sub - not sure why this functionality seems to have been dropped recently. I have had audio solutions that did this just fine in the past: the X-Fi cards will do it if you use the analog outputs, and the Turtle-Beach card I used to use did this just fine over S/PDIF. Oh well, not really a big deal.

Anyhow, it looks like the Realtek/NVidia sound going over HDMI wasn't really an improvement in sound quality or functionality over the X-Fi, so I think my next step will be to put the X-Fi card back in and try those PAX drivers to see if those work any better.

Also sounds like I need to screw around more with my receiver to see if I can get it to add the bass back into 2-channel tracks so I can get bass with my music again.

matteos said:
I agree, bought this one a number of years back for $50 for a while they didn't upgrade their drivers, but now I have one for win 7 64 bit.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829121122

The sound is great... surely the OP can use SPDIF or optical from motherboards onboard sound to receiver though? I have this soundcard in my PC because I have it and the sound is better than onboard, but it is fairly imperceptible
Click to expand...

ooo - that M-Audio 5.1 does look very promising. I'll have to look around to see if I can still get one of those. I like the idea of the M-Audio brand 'cause I know they make products with impeccable audio quality. But that 4-chanel solution posted earlier didn't look like it would solve any of my problems 'cause it was analog only and would still require me to buy a different receiver. This one with the 5.1 and s/pdif might do the trick.
 
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madFive said:
K - I tried running the audio over HDMI from my GTX570 through AVR to TV last night, and the video was fine. However, I really wasn't impressed with the audio. Highs were nice and crisp, but mids were a bit distorted and weak, and the bass was horrible. Got a lot of humming over the bass channel and generally not the punch I am used to hearing from my sub.

And the same problem was still present on Stereo streams. I don't necessarily want these to play in 5.1, but I do want the bass frequencies of the music to play through my Sub - not sure why this functionality seems to have been dropped recently. I have had audio solutions that did this just fine in the past: the X-Fi cards will do it if you use the analog outputs, and the Turtle-Beach card I used to use did this just fine over S/PDIF. Oh well, not really a big deal.

Anyhow, it looks like the Realtek/NVidia sound going over HDMI wasn't really an improvement in sound quality or functionality over the X-Fi, so I think my next step will be to put the X-Fi card back in and try those PAX drivers to see if those work any better.

Also sounds like I need to screw around more with my receiver to see if I can get it to add the bass back into 2-channel tracks so I can get bass with my music again.



ooo - that M-Audio 5.1 does look very promising. I'll have to look around to see if I can still get one of those. I like the idea of the M-Audio brand 'cause I know they make products with impeccable audio quality. But that 4-chanel solution posted earlier didn't look like it would solve any of my problems 'cause it was analog only and would still require me to buy a different receiver. This one with the 5.1 and s/pdif might do the trick.
Click to expand...

You must have something set up weird.

When you are using HDMI, the sound stream isn't being touched at all. It is sent and received by your AVR at 100% quality. A perfect bit-stream from what the source was outputting.

There is absolutely no way to send sound at any higher quality or any better than with HDMI.

If you try to use 5.1 channel via S/PDIF, then you are definitely reducing the quality as the stream must be encoded and compressed into Dolby Digital or DTS which throw out some of the audio data (lossy).

Using HDMI is like sending the original uncompressed lossless .WAV (LPCM). Using S/PDIF is like compressing the audio into a lossy codec like mp3. The lossless is simply better than the compressed in all cases.

For stereo, HDMI and S/PDIF send identical signals. Untouched 2-channel PCM. The AVR would receive the exact same bits with either cable.



My best guess as to why you don't have bass is this:

Before, you were either using analog or DD/DTS via S/PDIF. Presumably the sound when being encoded into DD/DTS or when being sent via analog carried your bass in the LFE channel and that the old sound output device was performing a crossover before sending the signal. With HDMI now, you do not have any pre-transmission crossover set up. You could do this in the Windows sound control panel, but you don't want to do it there.

What you want to do is send the untouched sound signal to your AVR and then in your AVR, you want to set your speakers to "small" and set a crossover frequency at their bottom range. What this does is tell the AVR that your speakers are only able to play sound well down to the frequency that you select, and to send all lower frequencies to the subwoofer. Otherwise, your speakers will try to play these low frequencies and nothing will be sent to your subwoofer.

What speakers do you have? We can try to help you find a good frequency to set your crossover at.
 
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SirMaster said:
Why is this? Three are some really excellent DACs that have USB input. The digital stream is untouched so what is the problem? The benchmark series are a good example that USB can do a perfect job as an audio transport system.

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/dac/dac1-pre
Click to expand...

JohnDC said:
Absolutely. If you are only interested in 2-channel sound to an amp or reciever, then this: http://www.amazon.com/HRT-Music-Str...4UFQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323302355&sr=8-1 will blow away just about any sound card out there.
USB can be very, very good if done correctly.
Click to expand...

@SirMaster, due to my experiences in the past.
@both, you are absolutely right, a USB device can be excellent if done correctly.

My problem is not with the USB datastream itself, but more because of the power supplied to the device. This obviously will not affect all sound card users, however, in my environment I have a lot of EMI/RFI and USB picks this up on the ground shield of the cable and superimposes it on the output and can color the input from the SDR. When using the SDR to transmit, it gets way worse. Granted I am doing things with my sound cards that 99.9% of users will never do.

It just happens that a great sound card for SDR is also a great plain audio card too. This is my basis and nothing more. I am not trying to poopoo USB devices. I'm sure that in standard usage some work great. My application does not allow for this.
 
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SirMaster is correct in his response. To the OP, to reiterate, your problem lies with your settings on your AVR, and not with an HDMI connection producing inferior sound. I personally have a Denon AVR so I can't help with your Yamaha, but it may be time to pull out the manual and check references online to set up your bass management correctly. As SirMaster said, somewhere in there you can set speaker sizes, and they should be small which means it will redirect all sounds below the crossover to the LFE channel.

Buying a sound card and avoiding HDMI is an expensive red herring. I would continue troubleshooting this.

I personally have a Denon AVR hooked up via HDMI but with 2 full-range floorstanders and no subwoofer. Floorstanders are set to large, surrounds and center set to small. I listen to my music in stereo only on the two floorstanders, and use Dolby PLII Cinema or DTS Neo:6 Cinema for the rare older TV show that was not encoded with a surround track (Dolby Digital or DTS). For movies and modern TV shows, the DTS or Dolby Digital track is bitstreamed over HDMI to the receiver, which decodes it and sends it off.
 
SirMaster said:
You must have something set up weird. When you are using HDMI, the sound stream isn't being touched at all. It is sent and received by your AVR at 100% quality. A perfect bit-stream from what the source was outputting. There is absolutely no way to send sound at any higher quality or any better than with HDMI.
Click to expand...

I'm still a little confused on this. I believe you that the transfer quality over HDMI line is better, but I still don't understand which device is generating the audio if it's streaming through my video card. Do the new NVidia GPU's have a sound processor on them, or is it just streaming the audio from my motherboard straight through? Just because the transfer method is flawless doesn't mean it's necessarily going to sound good. Garbage-in-garbage out rule is still in effect.

I did try the HDMI out last night, and it did sound fairly decent. My only big concern was with the weak output volumes on mid and bass, and that horrible hum that was coming out of my sub during idle. Not a big deal, but I still think it sounded better overall coming from my X-Fi dispite any flaws in the tranfer method.

SirMaster said:
What you want to do is send the untouched sound signal to your AVR and then in your AVR, you want to set your speakers to "small" and set a crossover frequency at their bottom range. What this does is tell the AVR that your speakers are only able to play sound well down to the frequency that you select, and to send all lower frequencies to the subwoofer. Otherwise, your speakers will try to play these low frequencies and nothing will be sent to your subwoofer.

What speakers do you have? We can try to help you find a good frequency to set your crossover at.
Click to expand...

Good ideas - thanks for the info! I'll take a look at the receiver settings and see what options are available to tweak the speaker frequency assignments asap. My receiver and speakers are linked in OP. Mid/low-end Yamaha receiver and Polk Monitor-30 speakers, along with a massively-overkill Infinity bass rig that can blast out like 120db at 20hz (don't worry, I don't actually run it that loud). :D Ideally I want the sub-crossover to cap around 80-hz and be extremely quiet in the 80-150hz range - otherwise it gets very painful to have those frequencies too loud. If the Polk speakers fade off around 100-120hz that would be good.
 
madFive said:
I'm still a little confused on this. I believe you that the transfer quality over HDMI line is better, but I still don't understand which device is generating the audio if it's streaming through my video card. Do the new NVidia GPU's have a sound processor on them, or is it just streaming the audio from my motherboard straight through? Just because the transfer method is flawless doesn't mean it's necessarily going to sound good. Garbage-in-garbage out rule is still in effect.
Click to expand...

I'll try to explain this part. It's quite simple.

To take a video game as an example because its the most complicated.

The game as a repository of sound effects (gunshots, dialog, ambient sounds, etc...) These are usually stored in uncompressed WAV, but may be compressed in mp3 or vorbis or something.

There are a few engines that can be used to render sound. By render sound, i'm talking about the process that takes place to go from the simple sound files on the hard drive to what you hear in the game. Most games uses their own in-house sound engines or some third party sound libraries bolted into their game engine.

Take the example of a simple gunshot in a game like BF3. When someone in the game shoots a gun, the game's audio engine pulls up the corresponding sound clip for it. It then performs calculations on the sound such as how loud to play it, how loud from each speaker, what speaker, how much echo, etc.

These sound characteristics are determined by where the player is in relation to you and in what sort of environment. This is what a sound engine does. It defines what sorts of calculations are possible on a sound and then performs them when appropriate.

All of these sound calculations are performed on your CPU. Not on your sound card, not on your motherboard, not on your GPU. After all these calculations and processing is done, the video game then outputs a signal to the Windows audio API. This can be a stereo or multi-channel signal depending on what output mode you set in-game. The in-game setting for say speaker number output is what drives and configures that in-game sound engine to adjust its calculations.

Lets say you set the game to stereo output. Now at this point in the process, the Windows audio API has a stereo signal (a bit-stream representing the combines audio from the game) being streamed to it. At no point yet has any sound touched our sound card, our motherboard or our GPU.

Now, if you set your GPU as the HDMI sound output device, Windows will simply forward this bit-stream to the GPU and the GPU will format the bit0stream into LPCM which is the format of the signal that is sent across an HDMI connection. This conversion is very minimal work and is completely lossless to the audio signal. In other words, the GPU isn't really doing anything to the audio, just preparing it for transmission via the HDMI interface.

If instead, you had selected to send the sound via a sound card like an X-Fi and were using S/PDIF with the 2 channel signal, then the same process would happen, and the sound card would just be formatting the sound for transmission across the S/PDIF interface.

So to answer your original question, the device that is generating the audio is really your CPU and it works the same no matter what sound output device you are using.


The only real exception to this is for games that use the OpenAL sound engine (there aren't that many). Games that use OpenAL can take advantage of more advanced sound processors found in cards like the X-Fi series to perform the sound calculations (how loud from each speaker, what speaker, how much echo). It is important to note that this is all just a digital calculation of mathematics and there is absolutely no quality difference between your CPU performing the calculations and the sound card performing the calculations. The only benefit is a lower CPU usage.


Now finally there are 2 other output modes that are slightly different. Analog, and multi-channel via S/PDIF.

With analog output, 2 more steps take place after the sound output device receives the sound stream win the Windows sound API. If you use the analog output on a motherboard or X-Fi, here is what happens. The sound card has 2 circuits on it. The DAC and an amplifier. First, that digital bit-stream needs to be converted into an analog signal. The 1s and 0s need to be converted into a series of voltages. This absolutely affects the audio quality in a negative way. The impact may be extremely minimal however depending on how good of a DAC you are using. After that, the signal needs to be amplified (which also affects audio quality) by the amplifier. Without amplifications, the signal of voltages would have no power to physically move the speaker to produce audible sound.

That last output mode in which I mentioned that you have probably used before is sending more than 2 channels out a S/PDIF port. The difference between sending 2 channels out the S/PDIF port and sending 6 is that for 6-channel output, the audio needs to be in a special format, encoded into one of two codecs called Dolby Digital or DTS. This encoding process will be done on the sound cards processor that has the encoding feature and it takes the raw 6 channel signal that the HDMI would have simply passed to the receiver and instead, the sound card converts it into a compressed signal just like converting a audio file on a CD to MP3. In this stage, audio quality is absolutely lost as the compressed signal is much smaller than the original audio. The amount of quality loss could be argued, but in a good AVR-speaker setup, it can be quite human-perceptible.

I hope this helps with understanding how the sound gets created in the PC.
 
madFive said:
Good ideas - thanks for the info! I'll take a look at the receiver settings and see what options are available to tweak the speaker frequency assignments asap. My receiver and speakers are linked in OP. Mid/low-end Yamaha receiver and Polk Monitor-30 speakers, along with a massively-overkill Infinity bass rig that can blast out like 120db at 20hz (don't worry, I don't actually run it that loud). :D Ideally I want the sub-crossover to cap around 80-hz and be extremely quiet in the 80-150hz range - otherwise it gets very painful to have those frequencies too loud. If the Polk speakers fade off around 100-120hz that would be good.
Click to expand...

With Polk Monitor 30s you should set your receivers crossover to 80Hz as they can accurately play sound this low. This means that all sound above 80Hz will be played by your speakers, and all sound below 80Hz (no matter which speaker it was meant for) will be played by your subwoofer. Your subwoofer will never play sounds above 80Hz when set like this which is what you want.
 
SirMaster said:
With analog output, 2 more steps take place after the sound output device receives the sound stream win the Windows sound API. If you use the analog output on a motherboard or X-Fi, here is what happens. The sound card has 2 circuits on it. The DAC and an amplifier. First, that digital bit-stream needs to be converted into an analog signal. The 1s and 0s need to be converted into a series of voltages. This absolutely affects the audio quality in a negative way. The impact may be extremely minimal however depending on how good of a DAC you are using. After that, the signal needs to be amplified (which also affects audio quality) by the amplifier. Without amplifications, the signal of voltages would have no power to physically move the speaker to produce audible sound.
Click to expand...

The sound needs to be converted to analog at some point. I don't even understand what you are saying this is inferior in comparison to.

SirMaster said:
That last output mode in which I mentioned that you have probably used before is sending more than 2 channels out a S/PDIF port. The difference between sending 2 channels out the S/PDIF port and sending 6 is that for 6-channel output, the audio needs to be in a special format, encoded into one of two codecs called Dolby Digital or DTS. This encoding process will be done on the sound cards processor that has the encoding feature and it takes the raw 6 channel signal that the HDMI would have simply passed to the receiver and instead, the sound card converts it into a compressed signal just like converting a audio file on a CD to MP3. In this stage, audio quality is absolutely lost as the compressed signal is much smaller than the original audio. The amount of quality loss could be argued, but in a good AVR-speaker setup, it can be quite human-perceptible.
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The Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect stuff is of crap quality simply because the codecs are tuned towards quick compression for low lag and low resource usage. I would never use it.
 
Thanks again for the info guys! I set my polk speakers in receiver to "small" and crossover to 80hz, and this seems to have fixed all my problems with the bass mix. Looks like I'm good to stick with HDMI for sound now.

I was still getting that hum from the bass, so I started troubleshooting that as a separate issue, starting with replacing the RCA cable from receiver to sub-amp, and it looks like that was it. Nice and easy. Sounds great now!

Time to get back to Skyrim. :D
 
grimster said:
The sound needs to be converted to analog at some point. I don't even understand what you are saying this is inferior in comparison to.
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It wasn't worded the best I suppose. This is what I was trying to say.

The OPs claim was that he was getting better sound from his sound card than HDMI.

I was trying to demonstrate that using HDMI has no point in the audio chain (pre-receiver) that affects audio quality whatsoever. As opposed to using the analog outputs on a sound card which does have signal degradation pre-receiver during both the DAC and amp stages.

I went on to say the quality degradation would be determined by the quality of the DAC, so that would really be what the quality comparison would be on.

I hope that makes more sense.

I was really saying it directed towards helping the OP understand that analog outputs (and 6-channel S/PDIF) have a place that degrades signal pre-receiver as opposed to HDMI which has no loss pre-receiver.

The end result was to get him to see that HDMI is indeed the best transport and that his problem couldn't possibly be because the sound card had better "audio processing" Which he didn't seem to fully grasp before my long post.


grimster said:
The Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect stuff is of crap quality simply because the codecs are tuned towards quick compression for low lag and low resource usage. I would never use it.
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Agreed, that and DD is only 640Kbit which is a relatively low bit-rate to be carrying 6 channels of sound compared to lossless which is 4233Kbit at 16/44.1
 
Related question - if what I have read correctly in this thread, there should be no difference in audio quality with 2 channel LPCM over S/PDIF versus 2 channel HDMI. In both cases, it's the same, uncompressed signal being sent digitally to the external amp/receiver, and hence zero difference in the quality of the resulting sound. Is that correct?
 
Correct. Don't let anyone convince you any different. There will be people who will try to convince you that different cables will change the sound. They are wrong.
 
Got it, thanks. In my setup, I'm using an HT Omega Striker hooked up to both an Onkyo and Denon AVR. One is fed from optical S/PDIF, and the other coaxial S/PDIF. That allows me to listen in either room where the two receivers are, or simutaneously if I choose. I have it set to 2-channel LPCM in the sound card's control panel.

I was thinking of running HDMI from my ATI 5850 to one of the receivers, but it sounds like I would not be benefitting at all from the current setup. In fact, I think I would be making more of a hassle for myself, having to swtich between devices in Windows to direct my output. Currently, all I need to do is turn on the receiver I wish to use, since both of them are getting the same signal concurrently.
 
The reasons to run HDMI over S/PDIF is:

1. Multichannel LPCM (from a video game and some blurays), otherwise you need DDL or DTS Connect, which are inferior.
2. You're already running it or need video anyway, so one less wire.
 
If it's humming you have some sort of ground loop issue (60Hz electrical cycling). In that case the first thing that should be done is to make sure everything is running out of one power strip. Also your subwoofer might have a ground lift switch, and you should flip that to see if it solves your problem.

Mabu said:
Related question - if what I have read correctly in this thread, there should be no difference in audio quality with 2 channel LPCM over S/PDIF versus 2 channel HDMI. In both cases, it's the same, uncompressed signal being sent digitally to the external amp/receiver, and hence zero difference in the quality of the resulting sound. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

Optical is less prone to radio interference and can remove one possible source of ground loops, but otherwise it should be identical--asside from the fact that HDMI will support higher PCM sampling frequencies (176.4KHz).
 
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