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c3101

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  1. Hi Guys I've been doing some research about building my own HTPC. After a lot of reading I stumbled onto computeraudiophile.com today (a goldmine of information), but yet I am still no wiser about what to do. Especially after finding computeraudiophile! First some background: I've recently splashed on a Onkyo AV receiver and a pair of Polk RTi A9's. Although I currently only have stereo, I would like to sometime extend it to a 5.1 system. I am now looking to replace my aging Mede8er (www.mede8er.com), as I found that there is a nasty between the Onkyo and the Mede8er when you try and use the HDMI, there is a 2 or 3 seccond delay before the audio actually starts playing. Also, the Mede8er does all the wrong things with .cue files, and the firmware is not going to be updated for my model anymore. So I figure maybe it's time for a HTPC and a software solution ? I'm on a bit of a budget (who isn't?), and have a metric ton of questions, I hope you bear with me. 1) After doing some initial research, and actually testing with a friend of mine XBMC centre, it had the same HDMI audio delay problem. It seems a lot of people have this. Can this be avoided at all ? 2) From a lot of the research I've done, it seems a lot of people are complaining about 2ch only output on their HDMI ports from boards like the Asus AT5IONT-I. Are these valid complaints ? The Realtek ACL889 chipset on this board seems to have multi channel support. Does this mean that you _have_ to use the s/pdif port to have multi channel audio ? 3) HDMI has enough bandwidth for 24 bit audio, whereas s/pdif "only" does 20 bit audio. But with HDMI being a compressed audio, am I wasting my time with it ? 4) If I skip using either the nVidia HDMI or Realtek ACL889 for audio, and put in something like the Asus Xonar, and use the s/pdif uplink on it, will it make any difference in the audio, as it is still the Onkyo AV receiver that actually processes the signal ? 5) I've only today (thanks to this forum) found out about JRiver. Until now I was leaning towards XBMC. I understand from a technical point of view that JRiver is "bit perfect". Is XBMC not ? Surely it still takes a digital FLAC file, passes it through a digital uplink (s/pdif) to the same av receiver, which is the actual component that converts it to analogue ? What am I missing ? Will the software actually make it sound different ? In short, I'm looking for nice, clear, quality audio, with nice, clear, quality video. I don't think I have the budget for an asynchronous USB adapter and a external DAC for the "true audio" experience. I believe my needs are more mixed, audio vs video, but leaning towards audio if you back me into a corner. What do I need ? What do I need to avoid at all costs ? Thanks for your reply!
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