HD-Audio in Mini HTPCs
This page gives information about the HD-Audio capabilities of the Mini HTPCs on our site. HD-Audio is the higher quality available on Blu-Ray discs and other HD video content. We have written a summary of the HD-Audio standards for our Media Player section that is also very relevant to HTPCs.

For a traditional HTPC the level of HD-Audio compatibility would be determined by the soundcard. In a Mini HTPC this is still the case but the soundcard is usually integrated into the chipset. So the NVIDIA ION for instance contains a soundcard. This make it simpler for us since all ION Mini HTPCs will have the same HD-Audio capabilities. However, the situation is complicated by the actual support offered being dependent on a combination of hardware support, software driver support, and media software support.

Providing the PC is fast enough then any HD-audio stream can be downmixed to stereo providing you have the software to do the job. XBMC for instance will downmix any stream. This means that with a mini-HTPC and XBMC you will at least be able to listen in stereo to any audio stream. The problems come with HD-Audio bitstreaming/passthrough, and particularly the lossless high bitrate Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA HD formats that can only be carried by HDMI 1.3 cabling.

NVIDIA ION
Dolby Digital AC3 and DTS should be no problem via HDMI or S/PDIF using most software. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are a different story, with no hardware support meaning that the only option is software decoding to LCPM then raw passthrough to the receiver. In Windows, PowerDVD 9 is meant to support full ION HD-Audio passthrough, and for Linux XBMC supports everything except DTS-HD MA.

AMD RS780G
The AMD chip supports full passthrough of DTS and AC3 but does not support passthrough of any of the higher bitrate formats.

External Links
• XBMC
• Sound Cards supporting HD-Audio
• Tom's Hardware
• October NVIDIA Windows HDMI audio driver update
• XBMC Linux help forum
• XBMC Windows help forum

Page last updated: 14-Dec-09

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