First time HTPC setup, questions regarding surround audio

Hi all,

For the first time, I'm looking to dive into something beyond the basic A/V setup and get a half-decent home theater experience. My question is regarding whether or not I will be able to achieve TrueHD/DTS HDMA with the setup I'm planning on; I'm a little lost when it comes to all of the codecs, drivers etc., so some help from you guys will be much appreciated.

My plan:

-Optical drive: LG BD-DVD drive playing discs via CyberLink PowerDVD 15
-Sound card: Integrated sound on ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer, according to ASRock's site running Realtek ALC1150 Audio Codec
-Receiver: Either the Denon AVR-S500BT or the Yamaha RX-V479BL, both of which are compatible with both formats (this is the only part I don't currently own)

Output will be via my GTX 770's HDMI and ultimately to 5.1 speakers. Looking through the Realtek page on the codec, it says:

• Optional Dolby PCEE program, SRS TruSurround HD, SRS Premium Sound, Fortemedia SAM, Creative Host Audio, Synopsys Sonic Focus, DTS Surround Sensation | UltraPC, and DTS Connect licenses

That's a lot of stuff I've never heard of and just want to know if my plan will work. If not, what part am I missing / any suggestions? Do you need any other info? Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Stumbled across this thread and a couple similar ones. Looks like the sound would bypass the sound card via the VGA HDMI, so that bit is a non-issue?

Pretty much your video card will pass the audio through the HDMI so you dont have to worry about the soundcard. Its up to you if you want to bitstream the audio codecs or let the computer process them.

On my setup I let the HTPC process the audio to PCM and then it sends to my receiver. The reason I chose PCM over bitstreaming is my receiver (onkyo) has to do some internal switching every time a new audio codec passes through it causing 1 sec of audio drop out at the beginning of any video. When I let the HTPC process the audio to PCM the receiver doesnt need to process anything so theres no drop out.

Hope this helps/makes sense.

Every receiver will have it's little quirks. I have an older model of that Yamaha you're looking at and just feed it PCM from the HTPC. Unless you've gone out and dropped massive bank on speakers you're probably never going to notice the difference bitstreamed audio offers. Audio straight from the GPU HDMI works great. If it's just a coin toss between the Denon and the Yamaha, see if you can have a listen to the brands in a store setting or something. I'm not such a big fan of the low end Denon's sound but everyone's different.

This is obviously a personal observation and is in no way subjective but when setting up home theaters the only brand of receiver i keep running into weird HDCP handshake problems with are Denons. Biggest tip for getting everything running well is to focus less on all the formats and stuff and spend more time setting up the room, tuning the sweet spots (calibration is really important! Both Yamaha's YPAO and Denon's MultEQ are pretty great) and just enjoying content. try not to fall down the money hole that home theater stuff can become. I've been there, i've recovered, it's all diminishing returns when you start chasing that sweet audiophile hotness.

The biggest part of your equation is unknown and that is speakers. My speakers (8 if you count the sub) are far and away the most expensive (and the most researched) part of my setup, just my RF and LF speakers cost more than the receiver....those uncompressed Dolby and DTS audio tracks will really highlight any shortcomings in your speakers.

The best tip I can give you is try and facilitate listening to the receiver/amp and speaker combo prior to buying. I was able to listen and tweak the amp/speaker combo I wanted in one of those listening room setups at a retailer and knew when I paid for the equipment that it sounded sweet.

From what I remember from building my own HTPCs, NVIDIA cards have had difficulty passing audio through HDMI without using NVIDIA software to enable that functionality, whereas ATI cards do it by default. This has been my experience, and it is what I have seen complaints of in HTPC forums. Be sure your card can do what you want in terms of audio through HDMI before committing to it if you plan on using any HTPC OS like Kodi (formerly XBMC), in which you can't use the NIVIDIA software necessary to enable audio passthrough.

EDIT: maybe nevermind, see below

My setup nvidia GT640 with OpenELEC passes through/bitstreams audio just fine. The newest versions of KODI have newer nvidia drivers that alleviate the problem.

@hmoney001: Oh okay, cool :)