VIA sheds more light on Envy24-II, new PC audio solution

At its official website VIA Technologies published interesting information about the soon-to-be-announced Vinyl Audio PCI novelties. As you know, Envy24 and Envy24xx are widely spread in various multimedia devices, on motherboard and even PCMCIA cards.

The new controller named Envy24-II will more likely be a logical continuation of Envy24 series than Envy24xx line and will be meant for professionals: improved digital hardware mixer, higher-quality ASIO support (through "flexible DMA architecture") for more effective usage of PCI bus and reduced latencies.

Envy24-II specs are noticeable better than those of Envy solutions:

• Sampling rates up to 192 kHz
• Width up to 32-bit
• 16 A/D inputs
• 16 A/D outputs
• Digital 32-bit hardware mixer for 32 channels
• Integrated S/PDIF transmitter with IEC958 direct interface (direct data transmission to receiver by PCM, DTS, AC3 protocols)
• 1 x SPI and 4 x I2C ports
• 2 x MPU-401 MIDI UART ports
• 10-channel GPIO
• 2 x reference quartz clock generators operating at 49.512 MHz/24.576 MHz and 22.5 MHz (external clock generators supported)
• PCI 2.3 revision
• 3.3 V (up to 5 V) voltage

The press release mentions that the device can decode new audio formats, including DVD-Audio, in hardware. Does it mean SACD is not an exception? There´s just one problem left: to make usual DVD drives read SACD media.

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