Who's hampering your Blu-ray sound?

 

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Posted on 27 Jan 2009 at 11:32

Blu-ray technology opens the door to a world full of fine, crisp picture quality and dazzling colour unparalleled by any other format, with superb quality sound to go with it. Well, actually not if you're using a PC, it doesn't.

In addition to producing high definition picture quality, Blu-ray discs also output high definition sound. But if you're using your PC to watch your Blu-rays, you're not likely to hear anything superior to CD-quality sound. Soundcards on the market today are configured to downsample your HD quality sound and relay it in CD-quality 16bit/44KHz format.

"It just depends entirely on the limitations of your sound card or motherboard sound card, as to what quality sound actually goes through. That sound goes straight to the HDMI port," claimed Benjamin Berraondo, product PR manager at Nvidia.

However, it's not actually as straightforward as that. This is a problem the PC industry has been working on for years, but has stumbled over a number of obstacles. Firstly, there's the issue of having a protected audio path (PAP) for high-definition streams over a HDMI connection. Soundcard manufacturers need to sufficiently protect the audio stream. If they were to expose an audio stream that is higher than CD-quality, and this solution was hacked and captured, these companies would be liable to movie producers for damages.

In order to overcome this obstacle, media player developers, such as Cyberlink and Corel, need to collaborate with soundcard manufacturers to make sure there's a secure connection between the two.

There's also a problem in the lack of HDMI 1.3 support. High definition sound requires HDMI 1.3 support, but components currently on the market tend to only support HDMI 1.0, and HDMI 1.2.

"We've started seeing this in discrete graphics cards about six months ago, but there also needs to be support in the chipset and mobile discrete graphics solutions," said Keith Kowal, marketing manager for the PC business at Dolby Laboratories.

In the case of Asus' Xonar HDAV 1.3 (Shopper 251), the soundcard has HDMI 1.3 support, the company has developed an HDMI audio driver and has collaborated with ArcSoft and it's TotalMedia Theatre solution to get a secure connection between the player and the driver. This soundcard is the only one that we've seen that delivers Blu-ray quality sound through your PC. However, Dolby's Kowal is optimistic that the industry will get back on track soon and offer ways to experience high quality sound to consumers, without resorting to using a specialist soundcard.

"It's a complex issue and it's taking a bit of time but the drivers are coming online," he said. "We would have liked to see a solution two years ago, but it doesn't always work that way, but I'm optimistic that we'll see solutions on the market by the end of 2009 that will support HD sound with no problems."

Author: Dawinderpal Sahota