Auzen X-fi Home Theater 7.1 HDMI 1.3!

I bet if you pulled your Prelude and added the Home Theater 7.1 without anyone telling you you'd never be able to tell the difference in sound quality between them. Unless you want HDMI 1.3 it seems like there is no reason to upgrade.

 

I said I need to move my prelude from between my Two 8800GT's to another spot. Because I gotta move stuff around to get to it if I want to change opamps and what not .. I cant fit it below my lowest video card. and even if i Could it be blocking the air going to it.

I wouldnt be doing it for the upgrade I be doing it because its pcie and would be out the way. It be behind my first card instead since there where the only pcie 1x slot is. I dont feel like removing my SLI bridge and my other video card when I need to get to it to swap out a opamp or put in a new opamp.

 

My post was a general statement, not directed at you.

 

oh I thought it was may bad.

 

I hope your receiver is good quality then because somewhere along the line, it'll get turned into analog.

 

That's the idea. I don't want the cards DAC at all. The X-Fi software does a poor job of bass management/crossover with subwoofers. Likewise, it lacks the calibration settings of many modern receivers. I want ALL of that kind of stuff done on the receiver, not the card.

 

if i understand it correctly, you can do that with ddl or dts-c, although they are compressed formats. there is no such setting for the high-res formats i think.

robscix, are you planning to do a comparison between this card and the asus hdav?

 

wait a minute, whats actually the use of ddl and dts-c on this card? if it can send lpcm through hdmi, you get higher quality sound than ddl and dts-c can provide, so those 2 things are useless here.

can't recievers do their processing when the signal that arrives is lpcm?

 

For different types of speaker systems or receviers. Not everybody who buys this card will have a HDMI ready home theater or even buy it for this application. It has many features which will attract many buyer types.

HTPC nuts, want their HDMI audio in bitstream so the decoding and processing is done by the receiver. This way their is no questions about windows posibly downsampling or anything of that nature. It is not about processing so much as it is about the decoding.

 

For those interested, this card is confirmed to support 1080p/24p video output which many are after for their displays.

 

Let say i do get a HDMI setup, would it do DD live or DTS encode thru the HDMI like it could thru SPDiF.

 

@Claymore, I am unsure if the card can pass DDL and DTS-C through the HDMI but they will be offered through S/Pdif.
It is possible they will be offered through this connection, but I am not 100% sure on that.

 

Will the upgrade programme be global or for North America only?

Thanks in advance.

 

I personally would love it if they came out with an X-Fi based card which had HDMI, and no analog outputs (to cut on costs!), for HTPC owners like myself.

 

The analog cable can be removed but you will still need to pay for it.

 

I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about a card which had all of the DACs removed, which would significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing the card. I'll still probably end up getting this one though, since I doubt they'll come out with what I'm looking for.

 

I understand what you mean, I am just saying you can remove the cable. This is one of the first cards available that can provide HDMI A/V. I would think sometime down the road there will be ones made with just HDMI output. For now, HDMI is still a niche market and so it is added to audio cards like any other feature so the card is applealing to many types of users for various tasks.

 

Yup, at the moment I only know of one manufacturer that is doing this... ATI, for the onboard sound with their 4xxx cards. (However, being a realtek chip, they come with their few problems)

EDIT: Changed Realtek comment to be more accurate.

 

I think those problems are mostly user problems. I got an 46" LCD tv a few weeks ago and i hooked my HTPC (Vista Ultimate 64 SP1 and using an HD3450) via HDMI onto it and i was afraid at first for problems, but everything worked just fine.

What problems are people experiencing then?

 

Overall I haven't been having much issues with ATI's Realtek HDMI, it's mostly just that in a few apps it fails spectacularly, such as Bioshock (sounds work until after the menus, then everything is mute). I'm not sure if it's a Realtek issue or just Bioshock... I've looked for workarounds, but the ones I found didn't work with the HDMI, since it doesn't have analog inputs/outputs. I also was having an issue where it took about 1/2 of a second from when an app requested to play a sound before the sound started playing (however it started 1/2 of a second into the sound) when using multichannel LPCM. Mostly not an issue, just don't hear Windows dings and bells. But in any case, this is starting to get off-topic from the Prelude HDMI.

EDIT: For a while there, there was also a CPU usage bug, where even at the desktop CPU usage was skyrocketed, but that seems to have been fixed in recent drivers.

EDIT 2: Changed my initial comment in my earlier post to be more accurate... there's just a few mostly minor issues, not a pile of big ones.