OnBoard Audio

Intel i845GBV comes with build in audio support. In my point of view the sound chip included on the D845GBV motherboard is simply a marvel even if some power users may argue it consumes CPU resources to work while a PCI sound accelerator wouldn’t. Well don’t get me wrong, the onboard chip isn’t designed to compete with a Sound Blaster Live or Audigy, but it provides a clear and nice sound that will please everyone especially music lovers along with some advanced sound features explained here. Easy to install (you don’t need to do everything since it’s integrated), easy to use with powerful and bug free drivers, and pleasant to hear are the features of SoundMax. The built-in audio support avoids the need for any supplementary sound card since it performs as well as them and so doesn’t waste PCI bandwidth (in case you have a top notch sound card you can always disable this sound circuit).  

The integrated ICH4/AC’97 audio solution combined with SoundMax SPX technology is a cost effective solution to provide users with a robust sound quality. SoundMax digitally synthesizes, spatializes and mixes music and voice streams by taking advantage of the processor horse power and companion stereo CODEC (COding and DECoding), achieving a perfect audio parity with consumer electronic devices.

Since the onboard circuit complies to the AC’97 norm it performs analog to digital conversion and perfectly supports simultaneous recording & playback operations. A typical AC’97 solution works like this when you play a wave file: the data is retrieved by the PCI controller, processed by the accelerator’s DSP, converted to AC’97 format and sent over the AC’97 interface to the CODEC. The audio CODEC then converts the PCM audio data to an analog output, which is passed to the back jacks and ultimately to the PC speakers. Today Intel processors offer enough power to perform these DSP effects in software without excessive use of processor bandwidth. In the audio world, the quality of what you hear is measured using decibels: more the dB rate is higher (on a scale of 100 dB) the more the sound is better and the apparatus is able to play near to perfection sound. With an approximate rate of 94 dB signal to noise ratio the SoundMax audio circuit reaches the quality of a good CD player (in comparison a tape deck reaches in best cases 70 dB). The circuit supports 44.1 kHz sampling rate to deliver outstanding audio and its frequency response covers what the human ear can listen from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz.

Another surprising feature offered by the SoundMax Digital Audio integrated system is the Sensaura 3D positional audio and environmental enhancement that lets you experience a full 360° sound. The same kind of technology is now present in many sound cards and modifies the phase and group delay of outgoing audio signals so users can experience an immersive, three dimensional sound experience. This technique is great especially in games (imagine you can hear your enemies arriving before they appear on your screen, or the bullets flying all around you) and when watching DVD. For high demanding real-time audio applications, SoundMax uses multi-voice DLS Wavetable MIDI synthesises with Staccato SynthCore Audio Rendering Technology to provide physically modelled sound effects capabilities.

The professional 4 MB DLS2 Sound Set offers 128 high quality recorded instruments while the XGlite Sound Set comes with a 1.2 MB memory that contains 360 instruments. If in terms of sound quality the SoundMax circuit doesn’t pale at all in comparison to a Sound Blaster Live!, it doesn’t offer as many outputs/inputs as the SB Live do. Indeed you can’t use surround speakers (4 way speakers) or digital ones since they are no SPDIF output. Thankfully you can upgrade the sound circuit with a CNR card to create multi-channel surround sound system by adding two, four, six or seven analog channels for use with two, four or even six speakers!

Sound Drivers

We tested the SoundMax Audio circuit with the latest 3.0 drivers release under Windows 2000 Pro as well as under Windows XP Professional with the latest final drivers from Intel. First of all the drivers are using the WDM architecture so they are perfectly compliant with the advanced power management & other DirectX features and perfectly integrated with Windows. The SoundMax drivers offer several software features that let you enhance the depth and strength of bass frequencies for the output signal, models the human HRTF (Head Related Transfer Functions) to position sound effects anywhere in a 3D sound field, and much more. The drivers also let you choose which music synthesizer you want to use, the number of voices that are needed for an optimum playback, etc. The latest 3.0 drivers come with the SPX extension: the Sound Production Extensions technology generate responsive, interactive, and dynamic game sounds in real time in response to game physics, environmental variables, and player input. In the near future more & more games should be released with SPX support.

  
SoundMax 3.0 Drivers Control Panel (click to enlarge)

SoundMax 3.0 Tray Icon