Xbox one Audio engine

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 16:46

hi all
My first reactions to the Xbox One, i feel the audio engine in it is truely truely awful, audio via HDMI into a 7.1 avr and no matter the source it's always sent as uncompressed Multi PCM, secondly it doesn't appear to be an always on engine as when navigating i get extra clicks and pops as it switches on just to play a stupid Ding noise, massive delay in this noise actually coming out aswell and the default volume lvl is terrible have to turn my amp from 30 to 20 just to get a comparable lvl and the quality appears worse

and many more niggles to not call this the only box you'll ever need

would love to hear other peoples opinions on this

antijoke · 22 Nov 2013 at 16:51

what have you got the HDMI audio settings as on the Xbox One?

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 16:54

7.1 uncompressed audio

Nikumba · 22 Nov 2013 at 17:34

Sounds like your AVR might not be detecting the signal correctly, what happens if you change the X1 over to something like 5.1 DD?

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 17:56

will check that when i can but will be the first device to not function correctly with my amp

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 17:57

i guess what i am wanting is passthrough to my amp but maybe the xbox one doesn't do that and will always decode itself

TheVoice · 22 Nov 2013 at 18:04

orby said:
hi all
My first reactions to the Xbox One, i feel the audio engine in it is truely truely awful, audio via HDMI into a 7.1 avr and no matter the source it's always sent as uncompressed Multi PCM

Not sure what the problem is here, sounds like normal behaviour.

james.miller · 22 Nov 2013 at 18:09

Nikumba said:
Sounds like your AVR might not be detecting the signal correctly, what happens if you change the X1 over to something like 5.1 DD?

it's not possible for an amp to confuse dd with lpcm or dts:ma, for example, they are completely different. If you've ever tried forcing the wrong type of decoding in software the pc then you'll know what happens - white noise.

TheVoice said:
Not sure what the problem is here, sounds like normal behaviour.

I'm going with this, though the breaks in audio is possibly something that can be patched out in a future update. Same for the low volumn audio effects as well.

orby said:
i guess what i am wanting is passthrough to my amp but maybe the xbox one doesn't do that and will always decode itself

do you get passthru for blurays? That should work fine, i believe, but i doubt you'll get anything for games. It's pointless when the ONE supports LPCM.

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 18:57

no passthrough for blu-rays also always Multi PCM on the amp display and again less than desirable volume

with the xbox 360 on the dashboard the amp display is always dd 5.1 with the xbox one on the dashboard it shows no signal until you move around then it pops and clicks and you hear the ding then goes to no signal again

again it comes down to wanting passthrough as i want my amp to do the job instead of the xbox

i know it's the first revision but for launch the blu-ray app is quite disappointing also

pioneer2000 · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:02

Weird, my Yamaha is working fine. Much better sounding than my 360 was.

Why are you bothered whether it says DD5.1 or PCM?

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:07

because the xbox one is doing the decoding not my amp and my £430 not quite all in one box versus my dedicated £1400 decoder/amp is no contest in what i want to decode content

james.miller · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:24

no passthru with blurays is one thing, but dd/dts/dd true hd/dts:ma from anything else is pointless.

orby said:
because the xbox one is doing the decoding not my amp and my £430 not quite all in one box versus my dedicated £1400 decoder/amp is no contest in what i want to decode content

for the console to output the above from anything other than a movie, the console would have to encode the audio, probably lossy (cant see consumer hardware having a dts:ma encoder some how....), wasting cpu cycles and adding lag in the process, then send it to the amp and ]then the amp would have to decode that stream, adding more lag. LPCM is lossless audio and with LPCM no extra lag is introduced ; there is no better output for games/the dashboard.

if you've got lag using LPCM at the moment, then your £1400 av combo should have sync correction. And, for that matter, it should have individual level correction for each source so if your ONE is quiet vs everything else, then try using the level correction as well. Be careful though as it sounds as though the xbox is probably set up to use the full dynamic range, could be painful if you start turning the pre-amp levels up and something very loud is played from the console. Does the ONE have any dynamic range compression settings?

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:41

it's not lag it's because the audio engine shuts down ie no signal being sent at all, then when it switches on it makes nasty pops and clicks before the sound is played, if it is a continuous sound then there is no lag or desync, it initiats the audio engine for a single ding or blip what ever the default xbox dash noise is if i continue to navigate it's fine till i stop and it switches off then i get the clicks

i need to get more info about xbox one games but the amp doing the decoding for gaming is huge also, my 360 games clearly list 5.1dd so the xbox decoding that would waste cpu cycles, the xbox one games have nothing on there no 720p/1080i/1080p or audio formats but again if there dolby digital i don't want the xbox one doing the decoding

james.miller · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:51

Apologies, i read the delay you spoke of in your original post as lag, not the delay in the amp picking up the stream again.

i need to get more info about xbox one games but the amp doing the decoding for gaming is huge also, my 360 games clearly list 5.1dd so the xbox decoding that would waste cpu cycles, the xbox one games have nothing on there no 720p/1080i/1080p or audio formats but again if there dolby digital i don't want the xbox one doing the decoding

Remember, the first xboxs had no hdmi output at all - all they had was spdif; so the audio output was designed around the limitations of optical spdif, namely 2 channel PCM or dd/dts. This meant, along with the lack of multi channel analogue output, that dd/dts encoding had to happen to get multi channel audio out of the console. When hdmi outputs were added to the 360, the audio support was never revised. Had the xbox have been designed with LPCM in mind from the start, you would have seen LPCM be the preferred audio for hdmi-equiped 360s.

{RE: ONE games} if there dolby digital i don't want the xbox one doing the decoding

I wouldnt want lossy dolby digital at all

LPCM requires no decoding from either the console or the amp. in no single way whatsoever is it inferior any other available digital format. be happy with it

just hope they can sort the sound shutting off. I had the same issue with my pc (ati 5850 hdmi output) which was sorted with different hdmi drivers so it's definitely possible.

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 19:59

i guess it's more so about how the xbox one is outputting it's audio not which format as again if i couldn't notice the difference or annoyances i would be none the wiser, i see the passthrough option as a simple fix rather than wait a possible 6 months for bug fixes and the coders truly get there heads around it and work out the optimisations they can make

Arthur Hucksake · 22 Nov 2013 at 20:28

PCM is really what you want to aim for, uncompressed is meant to be optimal. Sounds more like some sort of handshake issue.

Any bitstream settings?

orby · 22 Nov 2013 at 20:47

Bitstream is the word i was looking for I think more so than pass through but alas no setting for that either

You have on or off
And digital stereo, uncompressed 5.1 or 7.1 but again it's not a handshake it's cause the xbox1 switches the stream off when no audio is present and its a good deal quieter in volume

TheVoice · 23 Nov 2013 at 19:10

orby said:
because the xbox one is doing the decoding not my amp and my £430 not quite all in one box versus my dedicated £1400 decoder/amp is no contest in what i want to decode content

Nope, it's the other way around. Your receiver will display the audio format it's receiving; the Xbox 360 was always limited to Dolby Digital 5.1 (and regularly sounded worse because of it) whereas the PS3 (and both the Xbox One and PS4) can output uncompressed audio which your receiver processes itself.

james.miller · 23 Nov 2013 at 19:36

It's the other way round in the sense that the xbox had to encode the audio first, but the receiver still needs to decode it at the other end. if the receiver is feed with a discreet audio format, like DD or DTS (or DSD from a super audio cd, for example) then it has to decode that stream before it can play the audio.

LPCM isn't compressed, so no decoding needed.