Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Neat Little Machine

So you are able to send HD audio over HDMI? The spec only lists 5.1

The nVidia HDMI audio interface is 7.1, 24-bit, 192 kHz capable. The onboard sound chip only does 5.1. That handles the optical and analog ports. Both are available at the same time, but since they are presented as separate sound cards, a program would have to open and write to both in order for both to produce sound simultaneously. Most software won't do that, so you have to choose the default. Although it does allow one to hook up a mic for recording on one card while playing back through the other, which is nice and wouldn't work with an HDMI only setup.

Here are two screen shots I just took on the machine to show how the sound control panel looks:





It does appear that it can only bitsteam Dolby Digital, but I'm alright with that. And wrt your other post, yes, I told my boss at work to go with a lesser receiver which didn't support the HD codecs, but still offered HDMI sound to save money. But that doesn't seem to be an option much any more, because they all (needlessly) have added the support.

OK, that makes sense. If it were able to bit-stream HD it would be all over the net. Interestingly the ATI 5 series of cards appear to be able to bit-stream HD. WOHOOOO!!! I've been waiting for this. The info is buried in the middle of an article on anandtech from 3 weeks ago. I missed it at the time.

The low end cards are due Oct. 23. I would imagine that OEM mobos with this chipset onboard will be out Q1 or Q2 2010.

Since I already have the decoding capability in my avr, I don't want to have to pay for yet another component, the player, to decode.

Looks like I might not be buying a PS3 for Christmas.

Part of my aversion to doing the decoding in the AVR is the loss of some of the features of BD which can only be utilized if the audio is decoded to LPCM first. BDs can allow custom live remixing of channels, dynamically lowering the volume of the main program to mix in commentary on the fly, and while not that wonderful of a feature the playback of wave files in the BD-Java for interactive sound effects for games or menus laid over the movie. None of that is possible if the decoding is done outside of the player.

That's another reason I've passed on Oppo's first player. It doesn't have the power to decode the full resolution audio steam and mix in the secondary audio. It instead falls back to the lossy steam, decodes that to LPCM and then does the mixing.

Interestingly enough the slim PS3 when bitstreaming quickly switches to LPCM decoding when asked to do any mixing, it can do this without a full HDMI handshake, and only a little blip in the audio. That's the same as what I've observed with the HDMI sound from this computer. It can change channel counts and rates without upsetting the picture.