TABLE OF CONTENTS Seeing is better than hearing a hundred times
Ancient Japanese Proverb
Seeing is better than hearing a hundred times
Ancient Chinese Proverb
A picture is worth a thousand words
Ancient English Proverb
While different cultures may say it in slightly different ways, a picture can convey certain types of information much better than the written word. In this case, the pictures are audio flow charts and block diagrams. While these visual aids are commonplace for most audio equipment, complete audio flow diagrams including motherboard, audio codec, and software routing all combined into a single picture have not been available. This chapter is intended to change that situation.
Any reputable piece of A/V equipment that is designed to go in the living room almost certainly includes these kinds of diagrams as a key part of the system design process. However, these documents rarely, if ever, exist on a PC system design. As part of your system design, you should create complete audio flowcharts of the audio paths for the primary usability models in your system.
Unlike most audio equipment, the PC has multiple different layers of signal routing to consider. It must interface to the outside world, establish connections from multiple jacks to one or more audio codecs, route the signals from the audio codecs through the Intel HD Audio controller and a complex software stack to the applications that are consuming or generating audio streams. Each stage along the way could insert gain, attenuation, or some...
