The OC Forums HDA Mystique 7.1 Gold Thread

Hey all.
I introduced the first HDA Mystique 7.1 thread to this forum over 6 months ago and i've seen a few threads since regarding the card.

So I thought i'd start a thread regarding all aspects of the HDA card.

For the folks that don't know about this sound card, it is the first PCI based sound card that supports Dolby Digital Live, which encodes any (preferably stereo) source into Dolby Digital in real time.
It uses the C-Media CMI8768/PCI-8ch+ PCI chipset, which introduces 8 channel audio with Dolby Digital Live Real-Time Contents Encoder.

I just got my card a week ago and am very satisified with it.

Here are the obligatory pics of which we are all familiar with now:









My observations:

First off, as soon as you get the card, download the new drivers from www.hidiaudio.com. These offer better definition and seperation in the sound, as well as a few fixes. I found that there is more sound produced by the center channel with the new drivers and overall sounds a lot better.

I am using Cambridge Soundworks 5.1 digital speakers and have my external amplifier set to decode the Dolby Digital signal that I have passing through the SPDIF on the HDA Mystique.

Because the signal is passed through, there are no options to adjust bass or treble, so it is important to have a decent external amplifier which all you to adjust these settings. I am using a homebuilt 250w RMS subwoofer with the amplifier so I can adjust my bass level, crossover and phase so i'm set.
However I have heard numerous people saying that the bass ouput on the first set of drivers was far to high, I found the opposite, in that the bass level was quite low. With the driver update, I found the bass level increased slightly and was more defined. I dunno, could be just my setup.

I noticed another thing with this card, and it seems to be a glaring omission on Hitecs part. Any analogue INPUT source on my card, connected through the standard 3.5mm line-in, WILL NOT encode into Dolby Digital. I have a standard Hauppauge TV card and its output connects to the soundcards line-in.
However it refuses to play through the SPDIF. And contrary to what others have been saying about the analogue outputs being disabled when the SPDIF is enabled, they are not. I found this out when I connected a standard 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable from the front analogue output on the HDA Mystique card to a 3.5mm analogue input on my amp. The TV card played through the amplifier, so the analogue outputs were obvously active, and at the same time, I was playing an MP3 through the SPDIF.

The fact that no line in source will be encoded to Dolby Digital is very annoying for me. It means I have to have a cable from my analogue outputs to my amp as well as the optical SPDIF cable. This means I have to swap out the analogue cable each time I want to use my headphones or to watch TV.

Anyone else have this problem?

Apart from that little niggle, I find the card an excellent buy, especially as i got it on special offer of £29.95.

The sound is exceptional and is a welcome upgrade from my Audigy Player of 3 years.

Any thoughts/additions on the card would be welcome.

I noticed another thing with this card, and it seems to be a glaring omission on Hitecs part. Any analogue INPUT source on my card, connected through the standard 3.5mm line-in, WILL NOT encode into Dolby Digital. I have a standard Hauppauge TV card and its output connects to the soundcards line-in.

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Bypass the TV card's onboard audio decoder and use the sound card's decoder or a software based decoder.

How on earth would I do that?
The only way of getting sound from the TV card is through the line out on the backplate...

I rather like my bass, and I've heard that Audigy's generaly are a lot more "bassy" then other cards. Did you lose a lot of bass moving from an Audigy? I suppose its worth it either way, for the improved sound quality, and I can always turn my subwoofer up (Z-5500's).

The only way of getting sound from the TV card is through the line out on the backplate...

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Use different client software.
The decoder on most TV cards is terrible. You'll make the signal go through an unnecessary digital to analog to digital step.
By reading the audio data from the data stream and decoding it with the CPU or the sound card, it remains digital until the very last moment. CPU load should not be an issue as it's really no different from playing a MP3. I have never had any problems on my 2.4GHz P4 (though 1080i and AC3 did slow down other applications), so your 3.2GHz P4 would just be more margin. My Athlon 64 3000+ never shows problems with even 1080i.

Hmm, i see.
Have you any third party applications in mind?

And yes Yuriman, my Audigy had a good bit more bass that the the HDA Mystique. i was quite dissappointed to be honest, but the driver update seems to have made a difference, the bass output seems to be louder now.

Yuriman said:

I rather like my bass, and I've heard that Audigy's generaly are a lot more "bassy" then other cards. Did you lose a lot of bass moving from an Audigy? I suppose its worth it either way, for the improved sound quality, and I can always turn my subwoofer up (Z-5500's).

Click to expand...

well audigys are only bassy when people play with the equalizer settings.

all in all, you will like the sound quality of this card over an audigy, more becuase you bass will be much crisper, and defined, where as the audigy just has crappy sound, and thus makes the bass "boomy" and takes away from the sound, there is nothing like loading up a fav song for the first time on a badass system that the sub was built damn well for, and the sound pressure makes it so you cant breathe, yet you yell out loud at how badass it sounds, this card will get ou ther e much more then the audigy

Here's a question... how does this card do in gaming and DVDs?

EDIT: Please note that some of the stuff I said here was crap, as I did NOT have Power DVD setup to output 6 channels, lol. However, even so, the card cannot upmix a stereo source from a DVD successfully to 5.1, it must be outputting 6 channels.

Well, I can't really test the card for DVD's, because I have PowerDVD set up to pass the digital stream through the soundcard using the optical SPDIF output, into my external amplifer. Hence, the card does no processing on the signal.

However, I did disable the SPDIF pass through the other day, and set PowerDVD to 2 speaker stereo mode. Once in stereo, the HDA Mystique encodes the signal into Dolby Digital and passes the stream out to be decoded by the amplifier.
This, I was not impressed with.
Because it's so easy to switch between pass-through and stereo, it's very easy and quick to compare the two outputs.
The SPDIF pass-through was of course perfect, as it was a Dolby Digital bitstream coming directly from the DVD into the amplifier (the DVD was The Transporter, lots of action).
However the stereo signal upmixed to Dolby Digital by the HDA Mystique was not good at all. The difference lies in the definition of what sound comes from where. With the pass-through, when the car at the start of the film was turning fast corners and spinning and screeching and what-not, you could hear all sounds perfectly, tyres screeching behind you and off to the left, other cars hitting each other off to the front right, and hit objects flying all over the soundfield.
Dissappointingly, the encoding done by the card on the stereo signal was very much centre channel oriented, as with most hardware and software 5.1 upmixing solutions. Sure you could hear sound from all the other speakers, but the sound that was coming out of them seemed to be the same; just whatever came out of the centre speaker but at a lower volume, creating "surround" sound, but with no definition at all. Even the stereo sound seemed to be lost, as in a car would come in from off to the left of the screen but the sound would come out of the centre.
I switched back instantly to the SPDIF output and the difference was amazing, so much better.

But perhaps it isn't fair to compare the two, pre-encoded Dolby Digital is always going to be a million times better than encoding in real time. The HDA Mystique's encoding on the DVD was still very passable, creating a decent environment, but when it comes to comparing them, well, they just don't.

As for games, what can I say, excellent.
Hardly a conclusive statement as all i've played is Half Life 2 and Far Cry with the card, but Half Life 2 is amazing. I was a bit worried that the same thing might happen with games as with the DVD encoding, but no, it works brilliantly. You can easily hear where all sounds are coming from as well as the sound being crisp and clear. The atmospheric sounds created are amazing.
With Far Cry, I set it to Dolby 5.1 and loaded a game, but I only got stereo sound. But I think that was because I had my Windows settings set to desktop speakers. In fact i'm nearly certain of it. I just didn't really care at the time.
But i'll boot up soon and set it up properly.

As for music, I love it.
I thought my Audigy was very good for music, because it outputed to my Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 5.1 speakers in a 4.1 channel stereo, creating a convincing soundfield.
But the HDA Mystique creates a much better sounding effect. The music comes predominantly through the centre channel, but its also comes through the other channels at a slightly lower volume. This doesn't work well with DVDs as stated before, but works extremely well with music and the stereo effect is still present. The music produced is so atmospheric, it's easily comparable to AC3/DTS music (music encoded in Dolby Digital/DTS).

Actually I have recently read that there are conflicts with utilizing this card in anything other than stereo in FarCry.

How much is this puppy? I spent allot of cash on the Audigy 2 only to be disappointed.

What chips are socketed? As in, what do the chips say on them?

It's the op-amps that are socketed. The opamps shipped on the card are s4580p's which by all accounts ar fairly average opamp's.

That being said, i've read many reviews claiming that the x-mystique compares favourably
to a revo 7.1 with regards to sound quality. I wonder what gains upgrading the op-amps would bring....

shard said:

well audigys are only bassy when people play with the equalizer settings.

all in all, you will like the sound quality of this card over an audigy, more becuase you bass will be much crisper, and defined, where as the audigy just has crappy sound, and thus makes the bass "boomy" and takes away from the sound, there is nothing like loading up a fav song for the first time on a badass system that the sub was built damn well for, and the sound pressure makes it so you cant breathe, yet you yell out loud at how badass it sounds, this card will get ou ther e much more then the audigy

Click to expand...

What the hell? The audigy 2 zs actually has extremely high quality sound. The problem is most people don't use an on the fly resampler when playing MP3's. The audigy zs series uses 192 bit DAC's that don't scale well. So you have to use a multiple of 192 khz. 44.1 khz mp3's sound like crap. I almost gaurantee that you can't tell the difference in sound quality between these two cards if you know how to use an audigy and don't put 44.1 khz sources into it without modification to 48 or 96 khz. Also use KX drivers instead of creative..

I use an audigy 2 zs in my system, which is quite tight and powerfull and it sounds amazing...And I'm really picky, 256-320 kbps mp3's or CD's only, I have a hard time listening to 128-160... Do you even own an audigy? Sounds like you are not very well informed.

Don't just spread false information about the audigy series sounding like crap with zero factual information. I'm willing to bet that an audigy will even spec higher than this card.

As for bassy, it's because by default there's a +3 boost on 30hz using the default drivers. But you can change that in the settings...

i could say the same about resampling 44.1ghz mp3's, or indeed orignal cd material, to 48khz or higher.

resampling degrades sound quality. It's that simple. For the record, everybody ive seen who has moved from a zs to an x-mystique has said the x-mystique is the better card. That's not misinformation, thats straight from the people who own both.

(resampling degrades sound quality) Care to explain this?

Downsampling degrades sound quality
Upsampling aliases the sinusoidal wave and often leads to a less "abrasive" sound. How does it "degrade" the sound quality?

You realize that the highest quality Class A external DAC's upsample the input signal right? If you have the initial digital signal it's easy to upsample it with software and get the same result.

Perhaps this will help you to better understand upsampling -
Upsampling / Oversampling explained

Finally, any idea what these people who upgraded are using for speakers? VERY often people will subjectively hear differences when they spend the money =). I'd ask their friends who say "Yeah... i can't hear it, but whatever". I try to be as unbiased as I can be. I had my friends M-audio in my case last week, and switched back and forth ab style between the two.. We both decided that there was very little difference, nothing noticeable. And I use a full analog receiver with good enough interconnects, shielded speaker wire, and two Athena AS-F2 towers which are extremely revealing, along with two crisp subwoofers. I can't see how people could hear a difference between two "similar" sound cards when we couldn't hear the dfiference between a "gaming" card and an "audiophile" card.

I'd like to see rightmark results for the Mystique myself..

You cant compare upsampling to 48khz from 44.1 to the internal workings of a cd player..

Downsampling degrades sound quality
Upsampling aliases the sinusoidal wave and often leads to a less "abrasive" sound. How does it "degrade" the sound quality?

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could your "less abrasive sound" be what people are actually looking for? assuming that is the only change it makes, does that make it better in anyway?

There are purists amoungst us who dont like audio to be 'smoothed' out in that way - who what to get as close to the original as possible. What if we prefer it to be clean and crisp?

You know you can use all kinds of trickery to alter sound. to make it 'less abrasive', or to make it harsher. But at the end of the day, nothing sounds better to me (and many other people out there who are gunning for the best sound possible) than using no dsp's, no tricks, and no resampling.

It's down to personal opinion but ill tell you this: 44.1khz straight PCM from my pc sounds better then resampled 48 OR 96khz, and thats with any soundcard ive listened to. That's why 'audiophiles' dislike audigy's

Dude, you're taking this WAY too personally, I'm not saying that the mystique is a bad sound card, I'm simply stating that the Audigy is it's comparable sidekick. I doubt that there is a difference in sound quality. Unless you can show me rightmark results which prove that the Mystique has better output don't use that as an argument.

As far as less abrasive sound... You obviously don't understand this either, and refuse to read the link I posted, so I will explain.

I use abrasiveness to describe distortion in the sound. When you go from a 44.1khz signal to the 48khz dac on the audigy 2 card you get distortion that follows this curve
19KHz IMD=20%
18KHz IMD=10%
16KHz IMD=5%
14KHz IMD=1%

This is not a "pure" signal, as you so generalized. Yet this is the default signal that will come out of an audigy 2 zs without alteration. These values change to .001 % imd at 19 khz after resampling to 96 khz default. The resulting "purer" signal is less "harsh" because the highs don't distort painfully.

Saying that it aliases the sound wave to make itl ess harsh doesn't mean that details are lost.. This kind of DSP doesn't alter the original signal at all, it simply interpolates for information that isn't there at the cost of a little extra cpu.

The best way I can explain it for someone who really apparently doesn't understand is with a video card. Think of upsampling as Anti-Aliasing because it's exactly the same thing. The aliased "jaggies" are on the 44.1 khz wave, when you put them into a 48khz dac the DAC has to decide where each jaggie is supposed to go.. to output at 48 khz. This means that there will be some lost information because hardware dac's are not perfect and often times have trouble scaling. The higher the frequency the more information is lost because the more confusing the wave is to the DAC. low frequency waves have less change between sampling points, whereas high frequency waves have a much greater change between sampling points. This is why a 19khz wave at 44.1khz going to 48khz via hardware suffers a 20% distortion. This is quite abrasive to my ears. Which is why I fixed it via software just days after getting my audigy and hearing this for myself.

Does this help?

And to reply to your claims of purism, resampling outputs the "pure" signal when the DAC differs from the input... Seems like you've been dancing under a false flag here.

And finally, and repeated for the last time, if you're going to say there's that much difference in the output and that the audigy has a crappy bloated sounding signal please post RIGHTMARK data for the X-Mystique so that you can prove me wrong. If it has something greater than the Audigy's 117 db SNR reading (rightmark) or the amazing stereo separation I'd love to hear it.

I'm not taking anything personally. I'm only telling you what i know myself, and what others have also said. The x-mystique is a better sounding card. It's really as simple as searching google for a few reviews - thats what i did before i bought the card.

Now I cant prove anything to you regarding rightmark. That isn't what this is about. It's about having the experiance of both and deciding which is the better card. Search google for answers

As far as less abrasive sound... You obviously don't understand this either, and refuse to read the link I posted, so I will explain.
{SNIP}

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i've read it. You're assuming wrong again.

Saying that it aliases the sound wave to make itl ess harsh doesn't mean that details are lost.. This kind of DSP doesn't alter the original signal at all, it simply interpolates for information that isn't there at the cost of a little extra cpu.

Click to expand...

And like i said before, interpolation isn't always the best method is it? in your opinion upsampling to 48khz for a card that can't do 44.1khz is the best method, and for that card - i'd agree.

However in my opinion, and many others, outputting a bit-perfect 44.1khz is a better option still.

james.miller said:

It's down to personal opinion

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The best way I can explain it for someone who really apparently doesn't understand is with a video card. Think of upsampling as Anti-Aliasing because it's exactly the same thing. The aliased "jaggies" are on the 44.1 khz wave, when you put them into a 48khz dac the DAC has to decide where each jaggie is supposed to go.. to output at 48 khz. This means that there will be some lost information because hardware dac's are not perfect and often times have trouble scaling. The higher the frequency the more information is lost because the more confusing the wave is to the DAC. low frequency waves have less change between sampling points, whereas high frequency waves have a much greater change between sampling points. This is why a 19khz wave at 44.1khz going to 48khz via hardware suffers a 20% distortion. This is quite abrasive to my ears. Which is why I fixed it via software just days after getting my audigy and hearing this for myself.

Does this help?

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You see thats not true. Why are you assuming i know nothing? i dont want this to get ugly, but your not exactly listening to me are you?

1) You want to liken this to anti-aliasing on your graphics card? would would you choose? 800x600 6xFSAA or 1280x1024? or another example - would you take a regular dvd video and upsample it, or would i you prefer the proper hi-def material to start with? thinking about that will bring me to my next point..

2)

This is why a 19khz wave at 44.1khz going to 48khz via hardware suffers a 20% distortion. This is quite abrasive to my ears. Which is why I fixed it via software just days after getting my audigy and hearing this for myself.

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Yes me too. I'm glad we agree on something. A 44.1khz wave resampled to 48khz thru a dac sounds bad to you - good. It does to me to.why not output a bit-perfect stream to the dac's at 44.1khz avoiding all resampling and adding of info? Sounds like the best solution to me (pun intended). Problem is, you can't with an audigy2.

And to reply to your claims of purism, resampling outputs the "pure" signal when the DAC differs from the input

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Yup, i know that too. Thats why i keep going on about outputting a bit-perfect 44.1khz - getting it right the first time. Why can't you understand me?

And finally, and repeated for the last time, if you're going to say there's that much difference in the output and that the audigy has a crappy bloated sounding signal please post RIGHTMARK data for the X-Mystique so that you can prove me wrong. If it has something greater than the Audigy's 117 db SNR reading (rightmark) or the amazing stereo separation I'd love to hear it.

Click to expand...

Once again. please feel free to do some research. ask people here, people @ overclockers.co.uk forums, anywhere else on the web who owns both. Again it's down to personal opinion, but i'd hold the opinion of those who have moved from A2's pretty highly

Just wondering what you think of the card in general James. I see in your sig that you have a Mystique, so what do you think of it? And how do you have it setup with your speakers?

I stepped up from an Audigy 1, so I found the upgrade quite the improvement.