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The second quarter of this year will yield one of, if not the first HDMI sound card. It makes smart use of the PCIe card bus and is clearly aimed at Home Theater PC makers/enthusiasts.
It has full support for all of the 8-channel linear PCM digital formats except for DSD which is for SACD, a drive for a computer for SACD doesn’t exist, so it’s a moot point. For the complete list, here it is: Dolby Digital EX/Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS ES, DTS HD High Resolution/Master Audio, and DVD-Audio, there is also PCM Stereo support up to 24 bit and 192kHz.
No word on price or availability, but if you are constantly upgrading your Home Theater PC to keep up with the latest and greatest, this is something you’ll definitely want to add to your list of future purchases. I’d be willing to wager that Creative and likely Turtle Beach will have something to compete with this by the time it actually launches.
[via uberreview]
Ok, so if you have this, and presumably a graphics card with HDMI output, how do you combine the video and audio HDMI signals? Would the graphics cards output get channeled through this thing, or vice versa?
thats a fairly good question, but i am not entirely sure you’d want to combine the two
you’d have the video signals coming from your video card and going into your TV or other video output source, and then you’d have this going into your surround sound system
two separate direct connections going directly to where they need to instead of having to feed it into your TV and then into your surround sound or into your surround sound and then into your TV.
But don’t you get TV/LCD/Plasma’s with a single HDMI connection for Audio & Sound?
yeah, but chances are if you’ve spent the dough to make an HTPC, and you have an HDTV with HDMI input, you also have a surround sound system to go with all of it that sounds a far shot better than the speakers attached to the TV, so you only put the video into the TV, thats it, then you put the audio into the surround sound system
New amps route the sound and vision through via hdmi, so in that case you *would* only want a solitary hdmi cable from the pc.
There are two HMDI ports on this thing with the top one being an HDMI IN. I imagine that you would route the HDMI video from your GPU to this HDMI IN and then output the combined video/audio via the HDMI OUT to your TV or Receiver.
Blu-ray sound is 24bit / 96khz which is beyond that of SPDIF (Optical or Coaxial) 16~24/48khz bandwidth. As you see in the HDMI X-Tension image, only SPDIF IN is provided for sound input. Does this mean that this is not capable of merging Blu-ray sound (24/96) to VGA card’s Bluray Video ? Then this card is useless…
What you seem to be missing is that this is a card that connects to the mobo via a PCI-E 1x bus. It gets the HD audio signals in their full glory through that. As someone else mentioned above, it also has two HDMI ports–one in, one out. You run the HDMI out from your vidcard into the HDMI in on this card. The card then muxes the HDMI video signal with the HD audio signals and outputs it all via the HDMI out port.
Until vidcard companies start incorporating full HDMI 1.3 capabilities on their cards (something I’m not particularly counting on for a while, since audio is clearly not ATI or NVidia’s strong points), this solution (or others like it) will be the only way to get full HD audio via HDMI out of a HTPC.
This card is not rubbish the way that it works it that, you have two hdmi ports on the card one for the input of video and the other is for sending out the audio and video both together.
On pricing I called them up inquiring and they said around $100 the release price
Hope this help to anyone