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The Successor to AC'97: Intel High Definition Audio
An anonymous reader writes "A few days back Intel announced the name to
its previously dubbed 'Azalia' next-generation audio specification due out by midyear, under royalty-free license terms. The
Intel High Definition Audio solution will have increased bandwidth that allows for 192 kHz, 32-bit, multi-channel audio and uses
Dolby Pro Logic IIx technology 'which delivers the most natural, seamless and immersing 7.1 surround listening experience from any native 2-channel source'. The architecture is designed on the same cost-sensitive principles as
AC'97 and will allow for improved audio usage and stability."
Will it still also suffer from the same effects of background noise from the rest of the voltage going through the motherboard, or have they found a way to block that out also? 32/192 is fine as a standard... but it is still onboard sound. It needs some seperation from the motherboard to maintain a high S/N ratio
Does the royalty free license also imply that we'll see good opensource drivers for a plethora of platforms?
True progress from Intel, strange but true
This new system for audio managment is great news for portable devices such as DVD+screen, next-gen PDA devices and even handheld game systems *Gameboy Advance II or PSP?*
I've long been following PC related audio solutions, all the way from Sonarc to the latest 5 and 6 channel set-ups, my normal set-up is bass speaker, left / right and one for routing system alerts etc... this kind of announcement coupled along with the latest cards supporting the new Dolby processing solutions could well make me upgrade
More to post...
With modern audio requirements, getting as close to the fidelity of the original is the "flavour of the month"
Last year, Pink Floyd released Dark Side on SACD, 24-bit audio at 48khz / 96khz, the amount of clarity over a CD, once the benchmark, was remarkable, I attended a launch party at was blown away even in a relatively acoustic poor setting
I for one welcome consumer 32-bit audio
Logo that you could stick on the box and "Journalists" et al could include in the normal fluffy Buzz Word compliance reviews.
Help fight continental drift.
.. but when will we see high definition video support with component and dvi i/o?
Yea, integratedness has fallen out of favor with me. At least those things that are human detectable such as audio and video.
Integrated sound thus far has been a bad failure. It works well if nothing else is taxing the CPU, but otherwise, it can stutter. My nforce stutters when the network is active so no playing mp3s located on my Linux share...
Since you can fit ~80minutes of music on a ~700meg CD you have ~146K/sec for your music. That is at 16bit 44.1KHz stereo songs. Now audio data will take 8.7 times as much memory if recorded in stereo, but if recorded with eight (7.1) channels each song will take almost 35x as much memory thanks to the higher sampling rate and the use of 32bit values instead of 16bit. That is 5.08 megs/sec for your audio.
:)
I like that this standard is very future proof, but when can we use it? Already CD sound is good enough for all but maybe 10,000 people on the planet. Most people's audio experience is probaby limited by their audio hardware, not the source sound. Hey, most people are quite happy encoding their mp3s at 128k!
Where will the high quality sound data come from? Audio CDs are still going to be 16bit, stereo, 44KHz. DVDs have compressed audio. Almost all video games use compressed audio of some sort too because we don't have enough memory yet for even CD quality sound.
I love that it is 7.1 and that it is very future proof, but other than making 7.1 standard it seems to be a standard for marketing to use as an advantage, not something consumers will ever use (by the time they can use it they'll have upgraded anyway). It seems that this beyond CD quality audio is just included because they can and we'll never see it in use this decade
Better to overbuild than underbuild I guess. But I'm not excited about this promise of higher quality audio.
The hottest selling gadget of the "music" world is the MP3 player and the seemingly hottest article of contention is the online music store. None of these are even close to being prepared for 32-bit let alone the sizes of the files necessary to create such a file.
There are a lot of comments about 6.1 and 7.1 CD's or recordings and it's all rather silly. There's no real precident of a true recording done in surround. Would you really want the lead guitar only coming from the left rear channel? The only time that I would think that it would be cool would be at a live performance, but as far as I know no one has really done anything like this.
So were looking at several GB of needless information to recreate a CD with most likely marginal musical worth, and Intel is leading the charge? I think they're looking at their dwindling x86 market share (AMD is on the upswing, not pushing my Mac-centric views out there) and trying to find a niche by using it's brand recognition. I think Dolby and DTS will have more to say as to whether this proposed solution will have any legs.
Remember most of the manufacturers and broadcasters still haven't totally agreed upon an officially acceptable HD format! DVD took too long. CD was all Sony, but took long enough for acceptance. Where is this leaving the consumer? A 32-bit 192kHz audio card in their computer, decoding 7.1 channels of information so they can play video games using samples that have been resampled from their original 16 or 8-bit formats.
I think the word is overkill and it's needless. Most people can't tell the difference and for those that can, I scoff at you. I've worked with some of the best audio engineers in the world and they wouldn't be able to hear the nuances you claim. There is "air" there in higher fidelity recordings, but most speakers can't play it back any way. Ah well, thoughts?
Peace