Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Successor to AC'97: Intel High Definition Audio

Posted by michael on from the hear-hear dept.

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."

7 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. It is still onboard sound by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:It is still onboard sound by UrGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Mmmm, what would really be nice if the DAC's were not on the sound chip but in a sheilded housing if it's own and then some nice connectors. And the sound chip would have that digital audio interface - i forgot what it is called - if it even supports something as insane as 32-bits/192kbps

  2. OSS drivers? by cyb97 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does the royalty free license also imply that we'll see good opensource drivers for a plethora of platforms?

  3. Progress In Consumer Audio? Yes! by ten000hzlegend · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  4. Re:Isn't this just a bit much? by ten000hzlegend · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  5. Linux Logo opportunity? by bstadil · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Any idea what it would take to use this as an opportunuty to establish a sort of Azalia Certified for Linux Logo and a set of requirements that goes with it?

    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.
  6. memory requirements by Saville · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.