Audio question

How long until HDMI audio cards/Onboard audio? any idea Toms?

hdmi audio cards? if they do not exist already then its doubful they will.

we already have video cards which sport audio passthrough via dvi, and i assume hdmi. i have my receiver hooked up in this manner and it works perfectly. i believe you bypass an onboard card in this manner and let the receiver do all the processing though.

some cards do sport spdif optical connections which are around the same level as hdmi quality. some high end speaker sets for the pc (logitech) even take advantage of this. most receivers will have one or two spdif inputs as well.

why do you want an audio card with specifically a "hdmi" port for outgoing sound? the cable was made to carry both audio and video.

Well I guessi should have been more specific. I'm wondering when the possibility of us to get the high quality of, say, creatives best offerings and also have the great video card. I do as of now have a pair of sapphire 6950's, but every so often I get stuttering from the sound, among other things, which leads me to believe that if I did indeed have a discrete sound card I may not have these problems and am guessing I would have much better audio quality. But iwould love it if I could still only use the single HDMI that I use now. If I were to get an extremely good sound card I would have to have even more wires when I have a quality and able hdmi already delivering the video. Maybe I should be asking AMD this question haha. What do you guys think?

i have a $1500 sound system and a 40" television hooked up to a receiver which in turn is connected to my pc via a dvi-to-hdmi cable out of my video card. the sound is about as perfect as it is going to get. i believe the receiver handles all of the processing but i've never verified it. so a soundcard would be useless.

any stuttering could be due to some other factor such as your whole system stuttering. i've seen even high end systems do this infrequently.

having a dedicated sound card is really only an improvment when you are hooking up a pair of high end headphones to your pc with the xonar card or if you want to connect pc speakers since they use the 3.5mm plugs provided. also if your video card doesnt support sound out via dvi or if your receiver/speaker control only accepts optical not hdmi then you could export the sound via an optical port on some soundcards. if you are exporting sound to a receiver or television via hdmi then i do not see a point.