How To: Computer HDMI Sound to Receiver (ATI HDMI)

For my "How To" I'll be using my Yamaha RX 467 and my 5850

What you Need:

-A Receiver. The more modern the better as you have more options to connect your audio equipment.

As you can see, my Yamaha has 4 inputs for HDMI and 1 out. You'll choose on your receiver what source you want to be outputting.



Here's what your connector will look like...for those who never saw HDMI before.

• HDMI:
  
  
  -A motherboard/sound card/video card that can output HDMI.
  
  
• This motherboard can output HDMI as well as Optical but isn't packing an SPDIF connection....
  
  
  
  
• Sound cards like this Asus Xonar have started including HDMI connections
  
  
  
• And what I'll be using for this how to..is this HDMI output on my HD Radeon 5xxx

-DRIVERS!

I'm not going to link to all the drivers but the ATI ones. If you can't find the ones you need let us know what you're sporting and we'll get you on your way.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/hdmi_xp.aspx (these work on windows 7 x64. If you installed the full driver package and didn't change any of the installed options it should have installed already.
Edited by SpykeZ - 1/5/13 at 5:51pm

Now we'll need to connect your PC to the receiver.

Plug in the cable to your HDMI out on your motherboard/video card/sound card. Make sure sure it's all the way in. I had to remove some plastic on mine due to the PCI slots on my case getting in the way.

With the other end plug the cable into an open HDMI slot.





After both are plugged in you won't automatically get audio so dont' sweat just yet. When you use HDMI it treats your receiver as a video display device. I assume this is because of it also carrying a video signal.

Warning: There is a hardware limitation to using HDMI and multiple monitors. If you have 2 DVI monitors connected you'll end up losing one due to HDMI being on the same path as them. To get the 2nd monitor back you'll need to use the display port, if you're monitor doesn't use one you'll need an active displayport to dvi adapter.

Step 1: You need to setup your computer to treat your receiver as a video display to get your audio.
-Right click on your desktop and click on screen resolution


Step 2: When the screen opens up you should be presented with this. Your main monitor and then a mysterious 2nd monitor that's disabled which is your receiver. Click on it and verify the model number.



Step 3: There's 2 ways to acivate your monitor. You can either extend your display to it or duplicate the screen. I did duplicate for a while but I had issues with games sending the video signal to the receiver and not my monitor. So I did extend and put it in the bottom corner of my other monitor so I don't lose my mouse



Step 4...the last step..WOOT!!: Down in the bottom right you'll have a sound icon. Right Click that and click on playback devices..



Step 5: If you go to this step without doing the monitor steps as I showed above, your HDMI option will say "HDMI not plugged in" like this



If you followed the steps above you should be able to click on it and set as default.



Step 6: The last thing you need to do...configure those speakers!!!

Right click on your HDMI device after you set it as default and click on configure speakers



And choose whatever your setup is




FINISH LINE!!!

You did it! You should now be ready to listen to your music and so forth. In some programs if you did this after installing the software, you'll have to go into options and choose the ati hdmi as the new output. If you can't find the option please post here and we'll get you sorted





Edited by SpykeZ - 5/28/11 at 11:15pm

I just looked at some nvidia cards (I don't follow nvidia at all..0%) and see they have HDMI ports on their cards as well so this tutorial should work 100% for nvidia as well.

Can anyone here with an nvidia card and a receiver check this for me?

sweet thanks for the info

o.o

That's a bit odd. Shouldn't matter what DVI port you use I would think, I used my bottom before on my 5850

Ah well at least you got it figured out. Took me a good 8 hours to figure out how to get it to even read the receiver on my computer lol. Some of the things just aren't obvious like your receiver showing up as a display device haha. Thus the reason I made this. I hope you at least got some use out of it.