Sudhian Media sat down with Thomas Loza of Intel to talk about the new HD audio chip on the upcoming 915/925 Intel chipset based boards and how it will benefit over the aging AC'97 chip used on their previous boards.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
"Sudhian: What should we expect the Signal to Noise ratio to be on most HD Audio solutions? I know it’s up to the codec company but are there any imposed standards for SNR?
Thomas: No imposed levels are required by the HD Audio specification; however we’ll likely see these levels increase over time on the HD Audio interface. The PC industry is beginning to see value in increasing these levels to those traditionally used by the CE industry.
Sudhian: Intel’s Press release states: “The PC is a versatile platform for digital media and is playing an increasingly large role in DVD-Audio, streaming music services and home theater applications.” It’s known that the DVD Audio forum has been relatively tough on sound card manufacturers when it comes to DVDA Playback, will HD Audio offer DVDA playback capabilities on PC?
Thomas: HD Audio architecture supports the bandwidth required to deliver the high end sampling rates and multi—channel capabilities required for DVD-A playback. The full-rate DVD-A playback is a content protection issue that the PC industry will need to work closely with the DVD-A community to help ensure suitable protection of the content through the PC.
Sudhian: If so does HD Audio have hardware DRM support for DVDA or will the players be software based?
Thomas: At this time the HD Audio specification does not specify a DRM solution for DVD-A.
Sudhian: How does HD Audio compare to high end add-in cards such as the Audigy 2 ZS and M Audio Revolution?
Thomas: HD Audio architecture compares very nicely to specs of add-in cards as well as to those of stand-alone CE audio receivers. The architecture supports bandwidths that allow codec vendors to product codec products that can be superior in quality to traditional add-in cards and in some instances can provide more functionality than one can currently get from an add-in card."
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Sudhian Media
