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We played with the amplifier card for a bit, and while it does deliver excellent audio quality, we’re not ready to take our A/V receiver out of our entertainment center. For starters, the amp doesn’t accommodate rear surround speakers (it’s limited to left and right surrounds). And as terrific as it sounds, even a home-theater PC isn’t set up to handle all our audio sources (although the motherboard does have a pair of RCA jacks for analog line-level input. Plug in a stereo source—such as a VCR—and you can route the audio to the amplifier.)
But we also use a satellite receiver/DVR to watch and record television, and there’s no way to pipe surround sound from the satellite tuner to the PC. And while we could use the HTPC to stream music from our Windows Home Server machine, we still prefer the Sonos Multi-room Audio System for music listening. Besides, the pre-amp delivers a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and it sounds fabulous.
The reference design supports AMD’s OCUR TV tuner for use with the digital cable set-top boxes, but you can still only buy such a card as part of an OEM system build. Our reference design came with AMD’s ATI Theater Pro tuner card, but the value of over-the-air tuners such as this is severely by the fact that they can’t access premium cable and satellite channels (HBO, Showtime, et al).
AMD chose nMedia’s HTPC 1000B enclosure for its reference platform, the look of which fit right in with the other components in our entertainment system. The aluminum case has a single 5.25-inch drive bay for an optical drive and four internal 3.5-inch drive bays. The front panel has a cut-out for an LCD (the reference design had one, but the display is not included in the price of the case), and there’s a flip-down panel that hides one eSATA, one FireWire, and three USB ports; a media card reader; and 1/8-inch jacks for a mic and headphones.
We added Microsoft’s Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000, but we swapped out the useless (in a living-room environment, at least) mouse for a Gyration Air Music Remote (which you can now find for a pretty reasonable street price of $85). We connected the PC to both an Epson Cinema 500 video projector and a ViewSonic N4285P 42-inch LCD television.
Everything went smoothly until we connected the Maui system to a Sherwood RD-7503 A/V receiver: The computer would not send the receiver a video signal over HDMI with resolution any higher than 640x480 (480p). Curious to see whether the problem was with the computer or the receiver, we then connected the HDMI from HP’s Pavilion HDX 9000 notebook PC, which is equipped with AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT videocard: We ran into the very same problem.
We then tried a second desktop PC, which was outfitted with an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT (with a DVI-to-HDMI adapter). This time, the Sherwood receiver performed as expected. We also didn’t encounter any problems with the HDMI outputs from an upscaling DVD player and a Samsung Blu-ray disc player.
The last we’d heard from AMD, they thought the problem to be related to the computer not reading the receiver’s EDID profile correctly, although they told us they’d never encountered a problem with other A/V receivers they’ve tested.. Sherwood told us they’d seen a similar problem with a Motorola DCH3200 digital cable set-top box, but that they weren’t familiar with AMD’s Maui platform and had no further comment on the matter.
AMD’s engineers deserve a big round of applause for giving so much thought and consideration to audio while designing the AMD Live Home Cinema reference platform; sound is all too often overlooked in PC designs, and Maui’s D2Audio components are divine.
We know AMD is working hard to convince Hollywood and software developers that it provides the protected audio path that software Blu-ray players need to avoid down-sampling Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. Should they succeed, however, stand-alone Blu-ray players will still have one advantage over the PC: They can send both HD video and HD audio to an A/V receiver using a single HDMI cable: Maui will always need at least an HDMI cable for video and as many as eight RCA cables for audio.
Aside from those limitations, Maui is a splendid destination.
Comments are closed on this article
KnightGeek
May 27, 2009 at 7:40pm
I love AMD, but why can't this platform do audio through HDMI? Don't all of the Radeon HD cards support at least 5.1 though HDMI?
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linux_dork
May 13, 2009 at 11:12am
Here's my sweet home theater PC setup:
Inexpensive mid-range Gateway laptop with HDMI output + HDMI cable + my HDTV's HDMI input.
Hulu rocks on this setup. Do we really need a dedicated HTPC? I can envision wireless HDMI transmission from another pc to your TV.
Denis63
May 13, 2009 at 7:21am
That CPU cooler looks like the Rad from my car...
That motherboard looks awesome! i want one! make them affordable and ill buy one!
-Denis
mesiah
May 12, 2009 at 9:40pm
Until a few years back I worked in the high end audio industry, and I honestly can not see that card producing a true 100 watts per channel. If somthing that small really did produce that amount of power you had better have a really good power supply. Generally when manufacturers quote inflated wattage numbers with puny hardware they are quoting what I like to call the "if lightning strikes" wattage. Which basically means, in order for it to produce the listed output you'd have to strike the thing with lightning to get the amperage and or voltage up high enough to support it. So, if you want real quality home theater sound, don't toss out your pioneer receiver just yet.
RyanMM
May 12, 2009 at 9:21pm
Did someone forget to inform the people behind this that people with a Home Theater PC might have, I don't know, a HOME THEATER with a receiver? Even supposing that I could replace the Blu-Ray and DVD playback capabilities of set-top boxes, I'm still going to have at the very least a DVR/Cable/Satellite box, and perhaps a gaming console or 3. If I have a surround sound setup, you better believe I'm connecting that to the receiver.
At which point, all of the time and resources AMD spent on this proprietary and ultimately useless internal amplifier is for naught.
It's sad, and on top of that, this platform addresses none of my current concerns with HTPC platforms, which are mainly size, energy consumption, and content handling. Blu-ray on PC is an abomination. I remember when PCs were actually preferable to set-top DVD players because of the initial price/performance gap. PCs have never been preferable, and due to draconian DRM BS, probably never will be.
seatownrocks
May 14, 2009 at 2:53pm
I do not have a dvr, or cable tv, or satellite... so articles like this interest me...
mesiah
May 12, 2009 at 9:42pm
Agreed. What I would really like to see in an htpc is cablecard support so I can get rid of my DVR all together.
Caboose
May 12, 2009 at 6:57pm
This looks really good actually.
I'd actually add a PCI-E sound card that offers audio over optical SP/DIF, but other than that, it looks awesome!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
yogurt80
May 12, 2009 at 8:25pm
Notif you're ripping movies or play blu ray. Or both. Or doing any trascoding, or running heavy filters or time shifting. There's lots of room for a quad core in a HTPC.
Besides, quads are beoming so main stream, I give it only a year before we star seeing the demise of the dual core.
