Onboard sound on Asus P4P800

External Since: Mar 16, 2004 Posts: 21

Does anyone else think it sucks? I like the board, but the sound is pretty lame. No controls to adjust bass and treble that I
can find, and for the speaker setup, it doesnt list 2 mains with a sub. I would imagine that is a pretty popular setup but it
doesnt even list it. Or, am I just blind and are these settings available somewhere?

External Since: Jul 27, 2004 Posts: 2307

In article ,
husker3in4.DeleteThis@donotspam.yahoo.com wrote:

> Does anyone else think it sucks? I like the board, but the
> sound is pretty lame. No controls to adjust bass and treble that I
> can find, and for the speaker setup, it doesnt list 2 mains with
> a sub. I would imagine that is a pretty popular setup but it
> doesnt even list it. Or, am I just blind and are these settings
> available somewhere?

The bass and treble adjustments in the AC97 standard are listed
as optional. That means they don't have to be implemented for
a product to be AC97 compliant.

The datasheet for the AD1985 is here:
<a rel="nofollow" style='text-decoration: none;' href="http://www.analog.com/UploadedFiles/Data_Sheets/1198969AD1985_a.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.analog.com/UploadedFiles/Data_Sheets/1198969AD1985_a.pdf</a>

PDF page 14 of the document, shows the hardware capability of
the CODEC. Base and treble adjust are missing, as is the bass
boost button.

It could be that any special effects are all done by the processor.
For example, maybe you could set the thing to four or six speaker
mode, and turn down the volume on the unused channels. Turning
on "Virtual Theater" might take stereo source material, for example,
and extract a signal suitable for driving your subwoofer. The
sound will still suck though, because in the process of making
the derived sound channels, the algorithm will also mess with the
front left and right, and they won't be "full bodied". It will
change the channel separation on you.

An example of a full featured AC97 would be the A7N8X Deluxe board.
AFAIK, the chipset has a DSP in it, and there is a 7 band graphic
equalizer to adjust the sound. The AC97 Codec in that case can
be brain dead, as the Nvidia chipset preprocesses the digital
data being fed to the codec, so the codec doesn't need any features.

For other vendor chipsets, like Intel, I think the chipset doesn't
do anything other than DMA the sound data to the AC-link.

A soundcard or a motherboard with a PCI sound chip (instead of
AC97 based) will give more options, even the simple things like
bass and treble.

HTH,
Paul