G965 with Prolink HDMI ADD2 - Page 3

That's fair. I ordered a card so will soon join the ranks and can debug from two feet away instead of thousands of miles. I'll keep the forum informed of progress, if any. HDMI audio is not important to me right now as a consumer (I don't have a receiver for it yet), but putting my Intel hat on I'd like to see if this solution can be made to work.

I have a D965OT MB and got the Prolink HDMI card yesterday. I have been playing with the audio drivers, and thought I was close yesterday.

Video works perfectly. Running to a Sanyo Z4 (720P) projector through a Pioneer 84TXSi receiver.

I had the KB888111 installed before I started, and uninstalled it. I also uninstalled the audio drivers and the G965 drivers. I was following the manual install instructions for HDMI audio, but the found new hardware wizard come up with the Soundmax? Audio device rather than the Intel HDMI device. Nonetheless, I did the manual driver install, and XP accepted the drivers with a complaint about being unsigned.

Upon completion, I had the Intel HDMI audio listed in the device manager, but with an error that the device would not start.

Upon rebooting, the Intel HDMI audio device was gone, and I have not been able to get it back. I disabled the audio in the BIOS, and re-ran the KB888111.exe, but after I do, the new hardware found wizard does not come up looking for drivers.

This is my secondary HTPC, so my next thought is to reinstall XP from scratch with the audio disabled in the BIOS, make sense?

I am willing to try anything to make this work, so if there are beta drivers, or odd setups to try, I am game.

Regards
Brent

Does the HDMI device still show up in the Device Manager? You may also want to consider using the devcon utility to get a dump of what devices are known. Or manually go looking with regedit. You'll want to look in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum key.

I don't even get the option to select the Intel HDMI device on my DG965WH motherboard with the Prolink board. It just never detects the Chrontel chip.

And I take it you meant to write DG965OT not D965OT?

I'd like to know if anyone's actually ever gotten HD Audio to work out the HDMI port of an ADD2 card.

It is a DG965OT, and I have not gotten teh audio to work yet.

There is a HDMI key in the registry branch you mentioned.

--
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum\\HDAUDIO]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum\\HDAUDIO \\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7627&SUBSYS_80862503&REV_1002]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum\\HDAUDIO \\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7627&SUBSYS_80862503&REV_1002\\4&27f96ead&1&0201]
"DeviceDesc"="Intel(R) High Definition Audio HDMI"
"LocationInformation"="Internal High Definition Audio Bus"
"Capabilities"=dword:00000000
"UINumber"=dword:0000ffff
"HardwareID"=hex(7):48,00,44,00,41,00,55,00,44,00,49,00,4f,00,5c,00,46,0 0,55,\\
00,4e,00,43,00,5f,00,30,00,31,00,26,00,56,00,45,00,4e,00,5f, 00,38,00,33,00,\\
38,00,34,00,26,00,44,00,45,00,56,00,5f,00,37,00,36,00,32,00, 37,00,26,00,53,\\
00,55,00,42,00,53,00,59,00,53,00,5f,00,38,00,30,00,38,00,36, 00,32,00,35,00,\\
30,00,33,00,26,00,52,00,45,00,56,00,5f,00,31,00,30,00,30,00, 32,00,00,00,48,\\
00,44,00,41,00,55,00,44,00,49,00,4f,00,5c,00,46,00,55,00,4e, 00,43,00,5f,00,\\
30,00,31,00,26,00,56,00,45,00,4e,00,5f,00,38,00,33,00,38,00, 34,00,26,00,44,\\
00,45,00,56,00,5f,00,37,00,36,00,32,00,37,00,26,00,53,00,55, 00,42,00,53,00,\\
59,00,53,00,5f,00,38,00,30,00,38,00,36,00,32,00,35,00,30,00, 33,00,00,00,00,\\
00
"CompatibleIDs"=hex(7):48,00,44,00,41,00,55,00,44,00,49,00,4f,00,5c,00,46,0 0,\\
55,00,4e,00,43,00,5f,00,30,00,31,00,26,00,56,00,45,00,4e,00, 5f,00,38,00,33,\\
00,38,00,34,00,26,00,44,00,45,00,56,00,5f,00,37,00,36,00,32, 00,37,00,26,00,\\
52,00,45,00,56,00,5f,00,31,00,30,00,30,00,32,00,00,00,48,00, 44,00,41,00,55,\\
00,44,00,49,00,4f,00,5c,00,46,00,55,00,4e,00,43,00,5f,00,30, 00,31,00,26,00,\\
56,00,45,00,4e,00,5f,00,38,00,33,00,38,00,34,00,26,00,44,00, 45,00,56,00,5f,\\
00,37,00,36,00,32,00,37,00,00,00,48,00,44,00,41,00,55,00,44, 00,49,00,4f,00,\\
5c,00,46,00,55,00,4e,00,43,00,5f,00,30,00,31,00,26,00,56,00, 45,00,4e,00,5f,\\
00,38,00,33,00,38,00,34,00,00,00,48,00,44,00,41,00,55,00,44, 00,49,00,4f,00,\\
5c,00,46,00,55,00,4e,00,43,00,5f,00,30,00,31,00,00,00,00,00
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Class"="MEDIA"
"Driver"="{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\\\\0005"
"DeviceType"=dword:0000001d
"Security"=hex:01,00,04,90,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,14,00,0 0,00,02,\\
00,5c,00,04,00,00,00,00,00,14,00,00,00,00,10,01,01,00,00,00, 00,00,05,12,00,\\
00,00,00,00,18,00,00,00,00,e0,01,02,00,00,00,00,00,05,20,00, 00,00,20,02,00,\\
00,00,00,14,00,00,00,00,e0,01,01,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00, 00,00,00,14,00,\\
00,00,00,e0,01,01,00,00,00,00,00,05,0c,00,00,00
"Mfg"="Intel(R) Corporation"
"Service"="IntcHdmiAddService"
"ConfigFlags"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum\\HDAUDIO \\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7627&SUBSYS_80862503&REV_1002\\4&27f96ead&1&0201\\Device Parameters]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Enum\\HDAUDIO \\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7627&SUBSYS_80862503&REV_1002\\4&27f96ead&1&0201\\LogConf]
--

Brent

After my last post, I went looking in the device manager, enabled view hidden devices, and the HDMI audio does not show up.

One other note, the receiver that the HDMI is connected to is not on, and I am at work accessing the HTPC via LogMeIn, so that may make a difference.

Brent

This is kind of a stream of consciousness set of posts, but now using the devcon utility, and doing a findall search for audio, I get the following result.

C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Desktop>devcon findall *audio*

HDAUDIO\\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7627&SUBSYS_80862503&REV_1002\\4&27F96EAD&1&0201: Intel(R) High Definition Audio HDMI

1 matching device(s) found.

That item does not show for a devcon find *audio*, so it is not installed but has been enumerated?

Brent

I suspect what happened was that the Soundmax controller came up, you installed the HDMI driver on that, XP accepted this, and then on reboot realized that the Soundmax chip (your Sigmatel onboard audio) was not in fact an HDMI codec. The Vendor and Device IDs up there don't match what we should see for the HDMI card: the Chrontel chip that's used should come up as Vendor 17E8 and Device 0047.

The reason it's still showing up on findall is because findall looks at uninstalled devices, too, and you had the driver "installed" on the Soundmax at one time, even though XP corrected itself.

The problem seems to be, as with what I've seen with Bill's experiments, that the HD Audio link is not seeing the Chrontel chip on the end of the bus. Whether this is a miswired ADD2 card, a flaw in the Chrontel chip, or a motherboard design flaw is so far unknown, and what I will try to figure out when I get one of these in hand.

For the first time in using Intel made boards, I have noticed a problem that should have never gotten past QC: The SATA ports 2 & 3 are mixed up with 4 & 5.
I reported it to Intel and several revisions of the board still have it.
Hey Intel, plug in more than two HDD when going thru QC.

Edit: Just thought I'd pass it along to other Intel board users with a pic.

Yep, arch and I exchanged a couple of PMs on this issue. It really does look like there's a communication problem of some sort that has the motherboard not "seeing" there's the audio interface present. Calls to prolink's voice support were, well, less than insightful. E-mail exchanged with Taiwan got the usual "get the drivers from Intel" reply. They've yet to reply to the more pointed question of whether they've ever actually gotten this working on an Intel motherboard (any of them).

So at this point it seems dead in the water until arch (who's gone beyond the call on this) has a chance to debug it against what he already knows about the Intel boards.

I've got a Dell 24" LCD on the VGA port of a DG965WH motherboard. I've got a Pioneer VSX-82TSX receiver on the ADD2 HDMI port, feeding to a Pioneer 1140HD plasma. When I set the Intel driver into 'clone' mode using 1920x1200 resolution I've been getting what can only be described as "line snow" along the left edge of the Pioneer.

I recalled seeing in the Pioneer manual for the 1140HD that it wanted 59mhz sync. I thought that was a little odd as most software only gives you a 60mhz option. That's all the Intel driver would offer.

Then I installed Powerstrip and used the advanced options for the display. If I kick the vertical rate down from 60 to 59 it eliminates the line noise!

But then there's the under/overscan problem. In 1920x1080 mode there's about a dozen pixels or so that end up falling outside the viewing area of the 1140HD. And nothing in the advanced options of powerstrip seems to let me move the XY position or adjust the HV sizes.

So basically it's looking like the Intel driver isn't letting me 'get at' the necessary values to perfect the display. I've no idea if this is based on restrictions in the hardware or simply the software driver. The plasma, technically, is a 1360x768 panel. But that's not resolution that the Intel driver supports, nor could I cajole powerstrip into creating it.

For a brief time I had an nVidia 7300GT card in this machine. I had the same sort of setup with the Dell on VGA and the Pioneer on a DVI-HDMI cable. That card/driver was smart/flexible enough to grasp using modes better suited to the Pioneer. But since it didn't have a way to combine the audio and video into HDMI I opted not to keep it. That and if I used that card to mirror 1360x768 it looked terrible on the Dell. It was better to push 1920x1080i to the Pioneer and let it's superior scaler deal with displaying it.

So at this point even if the HDMI audio can be fixed on the ADD2 there would still be the video problem. It's basically looking an awful lot like the ADD2/motherboard solution just won't be suitable. At least not with this ADD2 card and DG956WH motherboard. I'd really like to know if anyone else has ever gotten the ADD2/mobo setup working.

I'll give it another week or two to let arch do some more debugging but it's looking like I'll just have to punt on the combined HDMI setup. That will require sacrificing any higher audio quality by going with just S/PDIF fed back into an HDMI video card. Bummer.

Glad to hear you solved your "line snow" issue-- somewhat surprised at how, though. As you've mentioned, Powerstrip and Intel's IGP have not been known to play well together, so I am impressed it even let you modify sync.

As for custom resolutions... sigh, this is a longstanding complaint about the Intel drivers, and I've tried to elevate it but so far it's still a work in progress. Supposedly they're trying to get it out of the Video BIOS and into the driver, but I've not heard of an estimated time of arrival.

I appreciate you hanging in there, Bill, but ultimately you need to make the right decision for your audio-visual pleasure. And if that's a discrete solution because you aren't getting the functionality you need from us, I support you. Please drop a note to the Intel support website telling them exactly why their solution was unsuitable. Or to me, and I'll pass it on.

I'm waiting for confirmation from Bill, but I think the audio issue is solved, folks. With the high-rez pictures of the board Bill supplied, coupled with a Chrontel reference design spec I got my hands on, I'm pretty sure I've found the culprit: the resistor at R27 should instead be at R26. The original Chrontel design offered four possible pins of the HD Audio link header the SDI signal could go out on, with jumper options across each. You can see in R26-R29 that Prolink left this possibility in their board design, and when they finalized their solution they chose one of the four to short... and picked the wrong one. They chose pin 11, which is a no-connect pin on the motherboard, instead of pin 9, which actually travels back to the chipset. Therefore, the HD Audio device never got detected by the chipset, and never got installed as an HD Audio codec. QED

There are three basic options to fix this and get your HDMI audio, depending on how crazy you want to get. The first and safest is to modify the supplied ribbon cable, swapping pin 9 for pin 11 on one end. The second option is to tightly loop a thin wire around pin 9 and 11 either at the motherboard end or at the ADD2 end, ensuring that the pins are shorted together: I don't like this one, as the signal integrity is questionable and it seems like it might come loose eventually. The third option is to solder a short across the R26 solder pads (yanking the resistor at R27 is optimal, but probably not critical: there might be signal integrity concerns with the extra stub providing reflections, but then again it might be okay). In this case, the included cable can be used unmodified. I like solution 1 because it involves a three dollar cable instead of a soldering iron and a $40-odd circuit board, but I'm clumsy with a soldering iron. Those of you who repair old solid-state stereos from the 70s will probably feel right at home with solution 3.

If this works, I'm going to inform Prolink of the problem. Don't know if they'll modify their design or the included cable or just ignore me entirely, but the point is: if you're willing to put a little elbow grease in, I think this will work. Yes, I agree you shouldn't have to: it should show up at your door, working as advertised.

I have some ideas on other ways to use this card, but I'll keep silent about them until I have confirmation of this working.


I just want to point out (you'll see why if you follow this thread to the end) that if you modify the cable you should always use an ohmmeter afterward to ensure you have routed everything correctly. We're swapping pins 9 and 11 of the connector on one end, but they are adjacent to pins 8 and 10: both of which are power. If you accidentally route power to a signal pin, there's a good chance you will fry the audio circuitry on your chipset-- possibly including the onboard audio as well. Make sure, after you're done, that pin 1 goes to 1, pin 2 goes to 2... etc. and the only ones which are swapped are pin 9 going to pin 11.

Great work archibael,
keep us informed!

LADIES AND GENTLMEN, WE HAVE A WINNER!

Thanks to Arch's tireless debugging and a bit of labor on my part (seeing as how I have the card and mobo) the HDMI audio interface is now visible to the OS! Woo hoo!

I'll dig into it further to see what actually gets sent out through the HDMI link. But meanwhile I wanted to confirm that Arch's idea on shorting pins 9 and 11 is viable. I pulled the ribbon cable off the ADD2 card and put a small length of wire into the 9 and 11 sockets on it. I then wedged the connector back into the board and powered up. Voila, the OS now sees the Intel High Definition Audio HDMI.

More on the functionality as I have a chance to test it. But this confirms Arch's suspicions about how the board is wired and how the motherboard sees it. As to who's "at fault" here is to be determined.

Ok, I got the audio working. I've now got both the video and the audio going out the HDMI port, through the VSX82 receiver and on to a Pioneer 1140HD display. I'm not entirely sure about the audio level however. The audio level seems to be a little low when playing movies compared to the system sounds. Not entirely sure about it as mixer configurations in windows is always a bit of a mess. I'll poke around with a bit more to see for sure.

I'd like to do some tests on just what "kind" of audio signals it's capable of sending. But I don't really have any idea on just how to "be sure" of what a source possesses and how the mobo audio can (or can't) be configured to process it. As in, if a DVD has "dolby" will the mobo pass it unmolested through the HDMI?

But I'm not as worried about the type of audio as I was about just HAVING audio at all. Now I've got both audio and video running out the same HDMI port, yay!

I'm thrilled this is working, and will ping my Prolink contact with a "fix it, here's how" message.

As for audio content... this is what I'm told is an 8-channel LPCM .WAV file.

I don't have the receiver to check if that's true; WinAmp reports it as 48kHz, but I don't know how accurate that is. Audacity does show 8 channels on importing. It's way basic, apparently just calling out the name of the channel. You can apparently roll your own with Microsoft's tools here.

As far as I know, this thing is only guaranteed to pass LPCM, though it's possible it will pass Dolby Digital/DTS bitstreams undecoded. It won't pass Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD natively, since the interface is HDMI 1.2, not 1.3; however, it might pass those streams as LPCM if WinDVD/PowerDVD decodes them (which I assume they're having to do right now to send them to the onboard sound for passing them out on analog).

Quick question: do you still get sound out if you've disabled the HDMI display in the graphics driver and are running over VGA only? Just trying to find out how independent the audio functionality is, if at all.

Much of the credit belongs to Bill: he was not only my hands and eyes, but tolerated my bizarre and often useless suggested experiments in pursuit of the root cause of the problem, which as a user with no stake in this matter was above and beyond the call of duty. He could easily have said, "This is too much of a pain in the ass," and RMAd the card on the first day and I wouldn't have blamed him in the slightest. At least I work for Intel and had an excuse for being obsessive about getting this working.

So once again: excellent work, Bill! I hope the solution works for you long-term, as I know you are having video issues as well (I'm still digging through those).

Has it been confirmed that the HDMI port is HDCP compliant, and that the 1366 x 768 resolution is supported? How about 1920 x 1080? Also, who sells the board? Thanks.

The Chrontel 7315 chip on board is HDCP 1.1 compliant, and there are encrypted PROMs onboard with key information. Has anyone run Blu-ray or HD DVD through it yet? Not that I know of.

1920x1080p is supported, 1366x768 not natively by the drivers-- can you point me to a working-well Linux modeline or Powerstrip settings for your display (adjusted for overscan)? Or the EDID information, at least.

Prolink sells the card directly. Shipping is annoyingly steep, but they're a single source for HDMI ADD2 solutions right now, so they can charge what they want.

Thanks, archibael. This would be to drive the Panasonic 50" 7UY plasma screen with the TY-42TM6D DVI input board, but currently neither do I have a G965 motherboard, nor an HDMI receiver -- just exploring the possibilities for my next build in a few months.

I found it will only do audio if you've got it configured to enable the HDMI 'Digital Television' output. But you can use it it the 'clone' mode without the TV actually connected if you've got a receiver in-between than properly understands HDMI. I've got it playing audio now out to my Pioneer VSX82 receiver without the 1140HD plasma even connected. I hard powered-off the receiver without the plasma connected, and likewise rebooted the PC. I still have the Digital TV option selectable and audio still plays. But it would not play audio if I selected the 'Television' output. That's the s-video output mode. Thus it appears to only push HDMI audio if there's an HDMI video mode selected. Not a big deal, just clone and have the receiver 'do nothing' with the video.

I bought my card direct from Prolink, yeah they gouge for shipping. Their support folks didn't have a clue about the audio (among the many clues they seem to lack...). So don't bother discussing it with them until someone in engineering smacks some sense their way. I'm sure they're nice enough people but damned if it doesn't piss me off when folks go out of their way to practice "sales prevention" in the face of a customer being ready and willing to buy something. Anyway, that's fodder for another rant...

While I'd have preferred that the board 'just worked'. And that I didn't have to learn so damned much about how little HD Audio has been actually implemented. It's a great idea but there appears to be next to nothing actually implementing it. Given the nonsense surrounding HDCP it seems even less likely higher-end audio will actually see much development for the consumer market. That's a shame, but bravo to the Microsoft folks for actually building support for it into the OS.

The step in the battle is video modes. I'd really like to use a 1920x1080 desktop cloned between the the VGA and the HDMI port. But that resolution doesn't look quite right on the Dell 24" LCD connected to VGA. There's an option in the driver for maintaining aspect ratio. It doesn't seem to work right but that's basically what I'd like to use. Push 1080 to the HDMI as normal but use top/bottom bands out the VGA port. There's possibly some logic to not using a full 1080 as the desktop. MCE doesn't need it and most of the content won't be at that high a resolution anyway. But until the driver allows selecting more modes I can't test other settings to see what looks best.

There's also evidence that suggests it's best to push native video to the Pioneer plasma as it's scaler does quite a good job upconverting to best match the panel's resolution. As in, trust the display not the PC to do the scaling. I've no idea if MCE has the ability to adjust it's resolution based on the content being pushed full screen. I have no idea how the Intel driver would react to THAT when using cloned output!

So until I can test a wider variety of resolutions to determine what's best (or least worst) on the Dell I'm planning on sticking with 1080.

Meanwhile if anyone has suggestions or demo software that will let me crank out a wider variety of audio outputs I'd be willing to try them.

Damn. That blows my hope of cutting off most of the edge connector and making this into the first PCIe 1x (or 4x) HDMI audio card. Thanks for checking, though.


I actually have the email of someone in... hell, now that I think about it, I don't know what he does. Marketing, I'd suspect, given the questions he was asking me. I think I can get it through to him that this situation is unacceptable and they need to either rework/redesign their boards (it's a single surface mounted resistor... it shouldn't be too hard!) or provide a hacked cable.


What Dell model is it? Is there an .INF file I could look at? What looks wrong about it on the Dell-- distortion or just blur (bad pixel-mapping = using crummy Dell scaler)?


Part of the problem is that many HDMI receiver chips (in the display) only properly accept certain resolutions-- and not necessarily the ones matching the display's native resolution. Even when you send the same modelines over HDMI that you did over VGA, in other words, you can get different results because the incoming HDMI signal gets scaled while the VGA does not, or gets scaled differently.


Are you able to get SPDIF out of DVD software? Or multichannel LPCM? I'd be interested in seeing if the WinDVD software that used to be able to play DVD Audio can play over the Prolink card: it is HDMI 1.2 compliant, and should be able to send DVD Audio. The question is, as ever: what will the software do? We solved the hardware issue, but there's a lot more out there.

That's great you got it working. But I don't think it will playback Blu-ray or HD-DVD (at least not from Cyberlink PowerDVD). It checks for the type of video card you have and will only playback on certain cards. It won't work with G965 graphics (well, last time I checked anyway)...

Certainly PowerDVD rules it out at this point. Haven't heard about WinDVD, though Intervideo seems to be partnering with us to some extent, so perhaps that solution will work.

We only solved the 'get something through the HDMI port' problem. What that something is and what it can be remains a mystery. It's dependent on the source material, what the hardware will support, what the driver will support and what the delivering software supports. Add HDCP on top of that and, well, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

I tried that 8-channel file. It's deep voice speaking 'left channel, right channel, center channel' etc. I can't get it to deliver the correct sound to the rear channels. That is, on the VSX-82 I don't know exactly what setting would properly deliver the sound, assuming that the sound being delivered it actually capable of it. So I'm dealing with several unknowns: the source, the receiver, the PC software, the DVD player, etc.

I'm no audio purist so just having "some" sound is good enough for me. But I'm willing to test things a bit further in the interests of helping others. If there are more people using this stuff then it makes it more likely that updates will continue to be developed.

Is there a DVD-audio test ISO online anywhere? I've got an Oppo 981 DVD player connected via HDMI. That might be an alternative way to confirm that the receiver can (or can't) accept a signal properly. As in, get that working first and then see if the PC software is (or even can be) configured to do the same.

When looking at the Intel audio driver, there's a drop-down menu for digital audio output. Among it's options are Inactive, PCM stereo, Dolby Digital Live and ADAT. What's ADAT?

I thought I would try the jumper method also.

It has not worked here yet. I am pretty sure I am shorting the correct pins. The picture is of the card end of the ribbon cable.

I have tried half-height pin jumpers, and now some stranded speaker wire. Video still works fine, but no audio hardware is being seen by Windows.


http://home.comcast.net/~hosted2/IMAGE.jpg

This may be basic, but when you go to Control Panel | Sound and Audio Devices and click on the Audio tab... what are the options under the Sound Playback dropdown? I would assume one of them is Intel HDMI Audio or something similar. When you click on Advanced after selecting that, can you choose "7.1 Home Theater Speakers" under Speaker Setup? It's a total guess, but that could be a reason you don't get the rears working properly-- perhaps the driver or UAA thinks you are in stereo or 3-channel mode?


I've got a program called Wavewrite (it appears to be open source, but there's no documentation included with it) that will construct multi-channel WAV files. It's limited to inputting 16 bit mono WAV files, but will mix them together to output a multi-channel WAV at whatever sampling rate the input files are at. 'Course, try to find a 192kHz input file...

At any rate, it also has a mode where it writes a sine wave of arbitrary frequency to each channel (it can be different for each channel), and you can choose 192kHz as a sampling rate. Putting together 5 seconds of 8 channel 192kHz audio at 24 bit depth is about 30MB I don't even know an application that will play it. Windows Media Player told me to look for a new codec once I crossed the 96kHz line. However, Wavewrite itself will play the sound at that rate through whatever device you choose through the dropdown box. The HD Audio bus can nominally send 32 bits of 192kHz 8 channel, but the Chrontel chip is only spec'd to 24 bits. This isn't exactly exciting content, but it should test out the high-end of the capability.

The Chrontel documentation also warns that the available bandwidth for audio is also dependent on how much is being used for video as well as the pixel clock. Would be interesting to see how the performance changes when driving a plain Windows destop as opposed to, say, a 1080p high-def movie trailer.

Want a copy of Wavewrite?

Rather a fuzzy picture, hard to tell what pins you're using. I've got the jumper between pins 9 and 11. 11 being the one adjacent to the blocked pin. Just a u-shaped section tucked up into the holes so it shorts the pins when the cable is reattached.

Then you're faced with making sure you've got the KB888111 update loaded. Check your device manager to be sure there's not a yellow exclamation mark on any devices inside the sound devices subtree. I had the driver already loaded so when I rebooted to came right up. I'm also running the latest (1/2007) bios firmware for the motherboard and have legacy audio DISabled in the CMOS setup.