NVIDIA High Definition Audio needs Audio Channel Remapping Tool.

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs Drivers - Linux, Windows, MacOS
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I am currently experimenting with:

GT 520 connected to VGA monitor
GT 520 connected to Denon 1909 receiver via HDMI.

Using NVIDIA High Definition Audio with HDMI cable to receiver which supports 7 speakers for 7.0 surround sound setup, subwoofer is not present.

I notice following problem which is probably not related to subwoofer missing though it might be:

The subwoofer channel and side left channel is swapped for some reason.

Unknown is what the cause of this swapping is.

Possibilities could be:

  1. Problem with Denon receiver swapping channels.
  2. Bug in NVIDIA High Definition Audio driver swapping channels.
  3. Bug in Windows 7.

Whatever the cause may be these audio channel issues seem prevalent.

Creative Labs has a THX console which allows re-mapping of audio channels which is a great solition for these kinds of audio-channel swapped problems.

I recommend NVIDIA adds a tool that allows the NVIDIA High Definition Audio Driver to “re-map” audio channels.

So that for example this new tool can instruct the driver to swap the subwoofer channel and the side left channel.

A gui for such a tool could work as follows:

  1. The tool walks over all channels and asks the user which channel it should be played out from.

So tool selects input channel, user selects output channel.

This is not ideal but this is how THX console does it.

A better GUI would simply allow channels to be swapped at will… perhaps with arrows indicating where the channels are truely going.

FL C FR SUB

SL SR

RL RR

Another easier way would be with a table.

Above is a typical surround sound setup.

FL = front left
C = center
FR = front right
SL = side left
SR = side right
RL = rear left
RR = rear right

A GUI could contain a tabel as follows:

INPUT OUTPUT
FL FL
C C
FR FR
SL SL
SR SR
RL RL
RR RR
SUB SUB

The input basically represents the input from games/files and so forth.

The output indicates to which speaker it should be channeled (/to which channel).

Now suppose the user has a swapped audio channel problem for whatever reason this new tool would allow the user to swap channels for example, the user can then alter this table as follows:

INPUT OUTPUT
FL FL
C C
FR FR
SL SUB
SR SR
RL RL
RR RR
SUB SL

Hopefully this would solve the problem.

Leaving channels out could also be helpfull to diagnose problems or disable unwanted channels:

INPUT OUTPUT
FL FL
C C
FR FR
SL -
SR SR
RL RL
RR RR
SUB SL

This seems a bit confusing is also a bit confusing but should work.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

2

It turns out the left channel speaker had one cable detached this was causing the speaker to not render any audio.

So perhaps this was the issue all along… and the sub woofer sound was simply being played by all or something else or so.

However I have noticed audio-channel swapping in the past, so this issue might still persist.

Unfortunately failure of installation of older nvidia display driver cut my experimentation short.

Once cause of this could be WMI service not running properly or adobe reader updater interferring when rebooting. Older driver also needed some kind of restart which newer seems to avoid somewhat or do later or less.

WMI service was not disabled… just running manual or not at all… it seem to be started. So not sure what caused older driver installation to fail, clean install was checked.

Perhaps I will repeat this experiment in future.

For example DVI-FULL to VGA cable <+> VGA monitor + HDMI cable <+> HDMI receiver.

To circumvent HDMI/VGA problem… where card thinks hdmi monitor is connected which is wrong assumption.

Anyway this driver inntallation fail scared the shit out of me… so I am doing risking my computer for now… also reconnecting cables all the time brings shock risks… so for now I am done…

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Don’t forget to follow proper static electricity avoidance procedure when connecting or disconnecting any sort of wire or cable.