Azalia and AC'97 audio....

Nakatomi2010

Alright, so I'm sitting here finally assembling my new HTPC and I'm staring at some specs here and my Intel board has High Definition audio, which according to Intel's site is known as Azalia, however... The cable in my HTPC has both AC'97 and Azalia connectors on it, and the motherboard has both an HD Audio panel on the board, and an AC'97 like panel on the board, the Azalia and AC'97 connectors will both fit onto the non HD-link, but the HD link is longer, and has more pins, but also "pinned" that I could in theory fit the Azalia onto it, just miss pins on each side....


According to the Intel site it should be Azalia, but I don't know which and where to plug in at......

vonPoonBurGer

What's your motherboard's model number? Being able to see the layout diagram would help me make more sense of the question, and having the BIOS reference will allow me to give more specific suggestions. What model is the HTPC case? Being able to see the connector shape on that end would also be really useful.

If I understand things correctly though, the two standards can use the same physical "front panel audio" connector on the motherboard. Here a reference page from the Intel website. Basically, the pin-out definition for that connector changes based on whether you're trying to use AC97 or HD Audio/Azalia, and the signalling arrangement that your board will use on that connector is determined by BIOS settings. So you may want to plug the case's Azalia connector into the front panel audio connector on your MB and check the BIOS to make sure it's set to do HD audio on that connector. Without seeing the shape of the connectors involved, though, I can't be sure that advice makes any sense.

Nakatomi2010

Intel DG33TL and the Silverstone LC16M case...

vonPoonBurGer

According to the BIOS glossary for your MB, the BIOS option to enable HD Audio on the front panel audio connector is under Advanced > Peripheral Configuration, and it's called "HD Audio Link." You'd want to make sure it's set for "Enable Both", so both the back panel connectors and the front panel audio header are set to do HD audio. According this this pin diagram for your chassis, the audio connector is 10-pin with pin 8 keyed, and that's true for both HD Audio and AC97. Unless I miss my guess, the case actually has just one audio connector whose pin-out changes depending on whether the MB is doing AC97 or HD / Azalia. If there are two connectors for some reason, just use the one that's labelled HD / Azalia. Either way, you need to plug it in to the 10-pin front panel audio connector, which does double duty for both AC97 and HD Audio, sending on or the other depending on what the BIOS tells it to do.

That longer 16-pin "HD Audio Link Header" connector is used to get serial digital audio out of the board before it goes through the onboard audio codec. You'd theoretically use that connector if you had some card that needed raw digital audio for some reason. For example, I think it might be used with something like this card in order to provide the sound component of HDMI out. If you were to plug your 10-pin connector into part of that 16-pin link header, I doubt you'd get functioning sound, and you might even be able to damage something. Page 49 of the your MB's manual has the pin-out definition for that 16-pin block, and apparently it's got a number of 3.3v and 12v connections. Sending 12v to something on a line where it isn't expecting that much voltage could be bad.