HiTeC claims world first PCI Dolby live card

SOMEONE listened to what we kept saying about Dolby Digital live support, or rather the lack of it. From the time we said that Sound Storm 2 is off the Nforce 4 and later even Nforce 5 chips, our readers kept saying that many of them would like to see Dolby Digital live support. Sound Storm was the only answer as until now Creative and Terratec failed to bring PCI based Dolby Digital live to the market.

However, Korean company HiTeC Digital Audio told us that it finally has such a PCI card. The company called it HDA Digital X Mystique 7.1 gold and this is supposed to be the first PCI based 7.1 Channel Dolby Digital live sound card. Of course it supporst real time content encoding.

The card is based on C-media CMI8768+ chipset and the company will show it at the forthcoming CES show. HiTeC is shipping the card to the Korean market since November and claims that it got a positive response from the market. It is not new in this market as HiTeC is specialised for multi channel decoders supporting various standards such as Dolby Digital/Dolby Prologic II/DTS and DTS ES - they have done this in Korea for the last four years.

The C-media CMI 8768 chip supports the PCI interface, has eight channel audio with a Dolby Digital Live Real-Time Contents Encoder. It's a full duplex eight channel card supporting 24 bit/96kHz DAC or two channels 16 bit/ 48 kHz ADC. It features SPDIF in and out supporting 44.1kHz/48kHz/96kHz sample rate and 16/24bits resolution.

The card should be available generally, after CES. µ