Electrical signals travel at almost the speed of light. There shouldn't be any latency to be concerned about, so long as the AVR is doing a straight pass-through of the video signal.
No, the RCA. Just a nice little intro thing is what I'm looking for.
As far as I remember video bandwidth is separate from audio bandwidth so you can't make audio not "fit" by pushing the video to specs maximums.
Yeah, and it's actually should not be too hard to make - just make HDMI officially capable to output audio only and the problem is fixed. I don't know why HDMI Alliance is overlooking this use case time and time again.
You don't need them since modern interfaces are completely capable of transferring 7.1+ linear PCM with 24 bits / 192 KHz. These lossless formats are pretty much useless for anything but saving storage space - which isn't an issue with real time audio from games.
This would be ARC and it has some severe limitations in modern HDMI 2.0 protocol (only stereo and encoded in lossy DD/DTS or something). They do plan on introducing ARC 2.0 in HDMI 2.1 which should solve some of these I think. But generally you'd want GPU's HDMI out -> AVR -> TV's/monitor's HDMI in since this will allow you to pass 7.1 linear PCM sound to AVR without any issues.
This somewhat depends on if the AVR you're using applying any kind of processing to the video stream it gets from GPU but generally - they don't and there is no additional lag.
I explained this in my post here.
That's correct - though I doubt any games will use pre-encoded TrueHD/DTS:HD tracks due to licensing costs.
Basically all digital audio is LPCM by default. You don't have to do anything.
Yep - though most games should automatically use the correct channel output, rather than requiring you to select 5.1 / 7.1
You only need to encode gaming audio into DD/DTS if you want to push >2 channels through S/PDIF since its bandwidth isn't enough for anything more than 2 channels when using linear PCM (16/44 I think). With HDMI you can push 7.1 channels in linear PCM at 24 bits / 192 KHz and thus there's no need to encode it into anything. Encoding into DD TrueHD or DTS Neo (or whatever its called, keep forgetting) won't give you any benefits since it's the same lossless audio as PCM and it won't fit into S/PDIF bandwidth either. The only benefit to these formats is that pre-encoded lossless audio takes less storage and this is only important for video / audio distribution (Blurays, streaming, etc.), not gaming audio.
Correct, there are no DDTHD/DDHDMA real time encoders - since there's no point in their existence.
Yes. Lossless formats provide the same audio quality as linear PCM. The only difference (theoretical, tbh, as I can't think of any reason there may actually be a difference) may be due to using a different decoder - if say your PC s/w decoder does a better or worse job than AVR decoder. But this, again, is relevant only to pre-encoded video/audio and not games.
PC games don't choose a format which OS/driver outputs to external device, user chooses this format and games just use user/OS/driver specified mixing format and then output the result in the user/OS/driver specified stream format.
HDMI compatible receiver will pick up LPCM with no issues. It's the easiest audio format to pick up actually since it's just a raw bitstream of audio data with no encoding applied to it so it's the least work for AVR to convert to analogue audio actually.
Basically. You don't really have to setup much in modern games though since most of them will simply pickup Windows speaker configuration and provide just some basic dynamic range adjustments like headphones / TV / surround.
You have to give us at least your expected price range since there's basically limitless number of possibilities otherwise.
I'm a big fan of the QC20. They may not be the highest fidelity headphones, but I find them very comfortable to wear for long stretches of time since the fit is very different from IEMs, and the active noise cancellation is very effective.
Just looking for something around $200-$300, maybe a bit more if the quality is there. This is more of a stop gap to last a couple years before I splurge on something real nice.
Yeah, I think so as well. HDMI 2.1 will only really be relevant when the switch to 8k and beyond comes. I just want to prevent having to upgrade again in a few years.
Well, entry levels are all usually sound kinda similar so the only advice I'm able to give you is to try and find a way to listen to the one which you'll select before buying. On the other hand, at such price, it's not a big loss if you won't like how it sound.
Not really, it is relevant for a proper HDR output at 4K@60+ right now. Which is one of the reasons why I currently withholding from upgrading my TV to 4K/HDR - I want to be able to push RGB 12 bits to it in 4K/60Hz at the very least and modern HDMI 2.0b doesn't allow this. So I'm waiting it out, looking at how TV prices are falling in the meantime.
I agree. That's why I think you shouldn't feed your game audio into a capture card then into a blue tooth transmitter to headphones, then to a microphone, then back to the capture card and then listen to it.
The fit is more like an earbud, but with a better seal as the tips have interchangeable silicone covers rather than being hard plastic. They don't get inserted into the ear canal like IEMs. That's one of the main reasons why I find them so much more comfortable.
I don't know what platform you're on, but it's starting to look like Assassin's Creed Origins and Rise of the Tomb Raider only support Atmos on Xbox, and not PC.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing but virtual surround processing still happens after the game engine has finished processing sounds and a lot of environmental information is discarded (for example regarding occlusion). I hope "real" solutions like Steam Audio will become more common in the future.
I see, thanks for all the answers, also hopefully those people on earlier pages that complained how their new console games didn't give them dtshdma audio also saw our conversation and gained understanding about this matter, lol.
Well that's not caused by virtual surround. Issues like a lack of occlusion are just how the game handles audio processing.
It saves space on the disc, which can be used to support more audio tracks (different languages), higher sample rates, higher bitrate video, or could allow a single-layer disc to be used rather than dual-layer.
Yeah and the hardware required is more like modern GPUs with more tight engine integration than just a simple effect library as EAX/EFX was. Steam Audio actually supports GPUs for accelerating ray tracing for sound along with baking propagation data which is sweet. I've never written or played anything A3D related but I heard it did something similar back in the days.
