My new sound quality

[Mark G.]

I just upgraded to an ASUS A7N8X-E and knew when I bought the board that it
was to have this awesome Soundstorm onboard sound. Although I do use an
older Logitech (2 satellites and 1 sub) system, when I used my old board,
which had onboard sound, it sounded much better. The old board was an ASUS
CUV4X-E. Was the sound on that board better then this newer one or
something? I looked through all the nForce tray options and all sounds good
except for the fact that it doesn't allow for a set up like mine. My
speakers go from one satellite to another and connect to the sub and from
there goes to the sound on the motherboard. I especially notice the sound
quality when playing a war game and there is a lot of action in terms of gun
fire and bombs it then starts to sound crappy. When I look to see what
version of the audio driver I have, it says 6.14. I thought I would have
better sound with this new board. Maybe I am doing something wrong. Can
someone help with this please? Thanks very much.

 

[dino]

supposedly Soundstorm is optimized for SPDIF..so the digital out only..my
Cambridge Soundworks digital speakers sounded awesome..bought the Logitech
Z-5300's and all of the sudden it sounded like hell. I was using the
analogue outputs instead of the SPDIF connector. Bought a SB Audigy 2 ZS and
the sound is great now.

 

[Paul]

supposedly Soundstorm is optimized for SPDIF..so the digital out only..my
Cambridge Soundworks digital speakers sounded awesome..bought the Logitech
Z-5300's and all of the sudden it sounded like hell. I was using the
analogue outputs instead of the SPDIF connector. Bought a SB Audigy 2 ZS and
the sound is great now.

I don't know if it is that cut and dried. SPDIF carries stereo, and
if the digital stream is AC3 coded, then a decoding device on the
speaker system can turn that back into 5.1 sound. I don't know if that
is optimal in any sense or not.

The AC97 consists of two parts. The "engine" in the Southbridge
and the codec (an external chip to the Southbridge). In the simplest
case (most chipsets), the "engine" simply DMA transfers data from
system memory, via the ACLink wires on the motherboard, to the
CODEC. The CODEC converts the info from digital form to analog.
The quality of the solution depends on how good the DACs are
in the CODEC, and the noise floor of the circuit board.

In the case of the Nforce2 chipset, using the MCP-T Southbridge,
the "engine" also includes a DSP (digital signal processing)
block. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing,
because it allows synthesis of different speaker setup models,
so say a stereo stream can be converted for use with a
multiple speaker system. Or the DSP can do frequency shaping,
in the form of a graphic equalizer. These are capabilities
that many motherboards don't have.

The curse is, when your speaker combination doesn't happen
to match the fixed configurations in the control panel. If
the "engine" is preparing sound samples for a different
speaker config than the one actually being used, the sound
can be hollow or funny, because a particular speaker's worth
of sound can be missing.

Also, the DSP is a complicating item, and may not be taken into
account by, say, gaming software. It could be, the combination
of some special effect from the "engine", combined with the
way a gaming sound engine works, may conflict and product an
unexpected effect. And, an immature sound driver for the
DSP, isn't going to give the best results. A simpler
implementation (a circuit that just DMA transfers data
to the codec) has fewer ways of screwing up.

Either adjusting the control panel, or changing the
number of speakers in your setup, could help with the
quality, assuming you aren't using a bug ridden early
release of driver.

There was a problem once, where the center and bass (both
signals live on the same stereo connector) got swapped, so
the bass wasn't getting the signal it was supposed to. This
was fixed with a workaround called "nvswap".

You've probably seen this already - it has some info on
the Nvidia control panel:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nf_audio_02.html

HTH,
Paul

 

[S. Conner]

Mark,

I have a six speaker/sub rig on mine and the sound is great. It's
not my home theater system -- but is more than satisfactory.

Since it does Dolby and all that, you need wiring and speakers that
will provide the proper connections to do that. When I bought mine
there were several inexpensive packages in the $80-150 range that
did a respectable job.

Rev