PC to AV Receiver audio switching delay in Minecraft

dsputnik

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Aug 12, 2008
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I have my PC hooked up to a Harmon Kardon 171 AV receiver via HDMI. When playing movies etc on my PC the receiver will switch its surround sound mode to best utilise the audio sent over the HDMI cable. Unfortunately when I play Minecraft I get problems with the audio as the receiver will switch to surround sound when there are noises being made, but if I stand still (no noises being made) it will switch back to it's standard output mode. This would not be too much of a problem, but whilst it is trying to find the correct audio mode (1/2 seconds) no audio is output at all.

I have tried to set the receiver to always output in a specific way, but the surround sound options are only able to be selected automatically by the receiver. I am therefore thinking I want to force the audio signal over the HDMI cable to be set to some surround sound setting so that the receiver will not keep trying to switch it. Any ideas on how I might be able to do this?

Thanks,
Dan
 
If you check the manual for the receiver I think you can select from various surround modes under the video game category. For this to work you may need to change the output of the PC so the receiver doesn't overide your setting. Try straight 2 channel and set the video game mode to a Dolby Prologic game setting.
 

dsputnik

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Unfortunately you can only select automatic surround mode on the receiver until a surround sound signal is being sent to it. This creates a problem as whenever I stand still (no audio) the receiver does not see a surround sound signal and therefore reverts back to the standard automatic selection.

I have since determined that if I drop the audio quality on windows down to 16 bit 48000Hz (DVD Quality) the receiver is far happier and does not take any time to automatically select the surround sound mode. It seems that at any other quality mode (higher or lower) it takes a while to understand the signal and adjust accordingly. I assume the standard signal it expects is therefore 16 bit 48000Hz and any other signal type will take a while to adjust to.

At least I have it working for now, but I would far rather have the highest quality set on windows. Is there any way to set that output quality dependant on the application producing the audio?