Amazon.com: avedio links HDMI Splitter 1 in 2 Out, 4K HDMI Splitter for Dual Monitors Duplicate/Mirror Only, 1x2 HDMI Splitter 1 to 2 Amplifier for Full HD 1080P 3D with HDMI Cable (1 Source onto 2 Displays): Clothing

 

Can't be something like that has to be dedicated, GSYNC won't work over it, I also use displayport for the monitor. When connecting 2 monitors like my normal monitor plus AVR windows always goes into dual monitor mode and all sorts of stuff stops wokring right like gsync , and firing up games sometimes they pick the wrong monitor, it's just really annoying.
I need hdmi sound output only somehow and haven't found anything that can do it. Or a way to disable 2nd monitor in windows but keep sound output (when i disable video it also disables sound).. so frustrating

 

Can't be something like that has to be dedicated, GSYNC won't work over it, I also use displayport for the monitor. When connecting 2 monitors like my normal monitor plus AVR windows always goes into dual monitor mode and all sorts of stuff stops wokring right like gsync , and firing up games sometimes they pick the wrong monitor, it's just really annoying.
I need hdmi sound output only somehow and haven't found anything that can do it. Or a way to disable 2nd monitor in windows but keep sound output (when i disable video it also disables sound).. so frustrating

Hmm well your use case is pretty specific. To my knowledge there are no HDMI sound cards.

What receiver do you have exactly?

What's wrong with using the optical?

 

Optical SPDIF is low bit rate (1.5mbits/s) only supports DTS and DOLBY Digital, the original versions. HD audio is uncompressed and only available through HDMI (like DTS HD master, Dolby Atmos or Dolby TrueHD)
I have a Denon receiver. Totally sucks there's no solution for HD audio straight out of the computer. I've been looking for years. If there was a passthrough displayport device that gave an ARC and supported 4k gsync etc would be wonderful. All it would have to do is split the audio out of the displayport and send it to hdmi.
And yes I know i can plug the receiver in to the hdmi but then it shows up as another monitor, and like I said windows adds it as another monitor and there's no way to disable it, and on top of that then I can't play copyrighted 4k content because that doesn't support hdcp 2.2 or whatever the version is so things like netflix won't work. Plus 2 monitors screws with gsync a lot and a host of other issues.
Maybe a video card that has ARC/eARC built into it if it can even work that way so it can send audio only out to it. Haven't found a good solution for this yet.

 

Optical SPDIF is low bit rate (1.5mbits/s) only supports DTS and DOLBY Digital, the original versions. HD audio is uncompressed and only available through HDMI (like DTS HD master, Dolby Atmos or Dolby TrueHD)
I have a Denon receiver. Totally sucks there's no solution for HD audio straight out of the computer. I've been looking for years. If there was a passthrough displayport device that gave an ARC and supported 4k gsync etc would be wonderful. All it would have to do is split the audio out of the displayport and send it to hdmi.
And yes I know i can plug the receiver in to the hdmi but then it shows up as another monitor, and like I said windows adds it as another monitor and there's no way to disable it, and on top of that then I can't play copyrighted 4k content because that doesn't support hdcp 2.2 or whatever the version is so things like netflix won't work. Plus 2 monitors screws with gsync a lot and a host of other issues.
Maybe a video card that has ARC/eARC built into it if it can even work that way so it can send audio only out to it. Haven't found a good solution for this yet.

I don't think there are any video cards that do arc on their own.

I feel what your going through. I tried going HDMI with a hdcp2.2 capable receiver and it still had a lot of issues. The hud on the screen in games would freak out the receiver. It was just really buggy. Probably would have worked better if I had used the arc channel to be honest. Ultimately I bought a decent sound card and went with analog 5.1.

HDMI audio is nice but the flip side of it is that you lose a basically any and all options to configure the sound, speakers, bass, etc. Unless your receiver has all the options you need, which o doubt, HDMI over PC with 5.1 is really only good for movies.

 

Monitor is using displayport, which also carries audio just like hdmi. It's ASUS PG27UQ. Receiver is Denon AVR 4000 something like that I'm not in front of it at the moment. I can plug the hdmi into the receiver and it does work and the HD audio works, the problem is it shows up as another monitor and I don't want it to. If there was a way to tell windows that it's not a monitor and to not send video to it or just send a blank image that would be fine but I haven't found a way to do that. Sound card is SB X-FI Titanium HD using the SPDIF out for now.

 

HDMI won't do that, it's against spec.

DP can carry audio, yes, but as you have found, your target device also needs to support audio Even if the monitor did support audio, it would only link at 2.0. DisplayPort MST is a feature of DisplayPort that lets you use a "hub" to connect several devices to one port. MST hubs can be HDCP 2.2 compliant. This would have been useful if non-HDMI audio extractors existed.

I was going to offer "What-U-Hear" to steal and redirect an audio source, but that only goes to PCM 5.1, so useless.

If it's the AVR-X4000, then you are unfortunately SOL hardware side as while 7.1 DACs do exist, and you can use software to change the channels to PCM output, the AVR doesn't look to have multi channel input.

Networked devices can not normally be used as a streaming device. ...Mostly.

So... Disgusting possible solution time as I'm out of other ideas.

https://www.icecast.org/ or similar.
And the "Internet Radio" feature of the Denon.

The way your hardware is laid out just makes a good solution impossible unless you can get a 2nd monitor playing nicely with GSync or a 7.1 DAC/sound card and a amp/receiver with RCA multi channel input.

 

I pass thru true hd 7.1 and dts x / dts hdma over nvidia Rtx gpu hdmi in windows 10 pro

I use mpc Be with some lav filter. Receiver gets atmos and dtsX bitstream

windows speaker sound configured to atmos

edit. I don’t know if a sound card or how to output only the audio bitstream without a display signal in your case

 

@f00zz did you ever find a solution to this? I decided to up my PC audio game recently and now have a solid 5.1 surround setup with a receiver as well but this all brought back nightmares of the last time I tried to do this a decade ago.

One Windows 10 era solution I've seen is to set both displays to duplicate, which I guess as of Windows 10 you can do even if the 2nd (phantom) screen doesn't support the main screens resolution. I've tried this and at least in my case it 'worked' but the second screen comes back after powering everything off then back on again.

Another solution I found is that Asus made a couple PCI-E sound cards around 2008 or so which had HDMI output. I'll try to find the exact names again but they were Sonar product lines.

To @KyadCK 's point about HDMI not sending only audio... I'm confused because my blu ray player has an audio-only HDMI output, as well as the regular HDMI out (Oppo UDP-203) so I'm not sure how they do it if it can't be done. That being said I've never tested it.

What I ended up doing back in the day was using a SoundBlaster that had DDL or DTS:C licensed in the drivers and doing that with optical to the receiver. IIRC DTS Connect has a bit higher bandwidth than Dolby Digital Live so the sound isn't quite as compressed but still - who wants to do that when it is technically possible to get uncompressed 8 channel out over HDMI? UGH!

I'm going to keep digging around and if I find a way to do this that doesn't result in a non-existent 2nd display in Windows I'll share it here.

 

You can use a low-cost video card with a HDMI connection. To Windows, audio through its HDMI port is a separate sound device which you can choose from the Windows Sound settings configuration.

Ow, and if you have an NVidia primary video card, you could use the low-cost card as a Phys-X addon when you go for an NVidia.

 

So. Know this thread is old and it's not truely what you asked for i.e. not a sound card but I figured I'd post here in case it helped someone else, might do reddit too but what I did (and my aging GTX 780) can barely do this. I have a three monitor setup (a 3440x1440p Ultrawide, and 2x 2560x1440) with a 5.1ch Onkyo Receiver. I output bitstream to my receiver. Like you I get no sound if I turn the spare monitors off when say watching a movie. My 780 has 4 ports on it. One is a Displayport, one is a HDMI, and two DVI. I got some DVI->HDMI adapters. Now I'm outputting the audio over the HDMI and mirroring the display (@1080P which is the max resolution I can get my receiver to detect properly) with one of the ones that're on the DVI adapters. Now I can turn the spare monitors off and it still "sees" one on so I get audio while they actual displays are off. Downsides is for 4K playback the video chuggs unless you use DXVA or similar.

 

I have got a cambridge audio 4k bluray player which has an hdmi in, it has 2 hdm outputs one for tv and one for dedicated sound only.

 

Can you post the model number here?

 

Great cd player sacd as well

 

Most of the issues in this realm are probably from licensing issues... to make a sound card output the newer formats over HDMI. All parties involved in the technology need to get their cut of each unit sold.

 

Replying to my own thread. I solved this in a non elegant way by having two GPUs in my computer, also 2 different manufacturers, nvidia and amd so it was 2 different drivers. This made it so I can use the 2nd card as audio output to my receiver and it thinks it's another monitor of course but since it's not connected to my main GPU it doesn't mess with gsync as much, although there are still some glitches. I used windows to position the screen so it's impossible for the mouse to disappear on the non-screen area. This seems to work well enough.. If I use the same video card for it, all hell breaks loose, screen goes black requiring computer reset very often, gsync glitches out, huge pain. So older cheap radeon card rx550 or whatever low profile with pcie 1x adapter so it doesn't take my x16 lanes just to use for sound output, and then main GPU in normal x16 slot.

 

What would absolutely be amazing is to have the receiver on my ethernet network, and my pc stream the bitstream to it and it decodes atmos,true hd dts:x etc , but i doubt that's ever going to happen although would be awesome and wouldn't need any of these crazy solutions

 

Sorry to necro this thread but I registered here just to reply and possibly help. I've battled this issue myself and have a solution that should work.

I have 3 monitors and an RTX3080. The 3080 has 3 DP ports and 1 HDMI port.

Left monitor is connected directly to the GPU Via DP
Center monitor is connected directly to the GPU via DP
Right Monitor is connected directly to the GPU Via DP
Vizio 5.1.2 Atmos soundbar is connected to the GPU via HDMI cable (connected at the eARC hdmi input).

Now, the problem is that like everyone else has mentioned, the soundbar does not register unless it has some kind of video source. This can be done by going into display settings and finding the "ghost" display for the soundbar and mirroring it to one of your monitors. From there I just renamed mine to Vizio soundbar in the sound settings and away I went. I do however have issues with the computer losing sound occasionally and the audio format being dropped from DTS:X or atmos to just nothing. I usually have to set it back to the right format and then hit the test button a few times for it to come back. It's a hassle, but there's no way I could go back to using traditional desktop speakers for gaming and consuming media content. Now I just need to figure out how to get one more HDMI out from somewhere so I can run my sensor panel for my rigs temp monitors lol. Hope this helps

 

What about your receiver in between the PC and your monitor? Use a receiver than can pass through 4k120 and you should be good. I am using this setup and it works fine.

My problem is my gpu/windows is feeding my receiver low quality audio with special effects etc. What I want is uncompressed HD audio or Bitstream or whatever you call it. I don't want "multi channel in" I want it to feed my receiver with the same format a DVD player would for example. Music should auto output in stereo, game should be 5.1 etc.

Chromecast for example has wayyyyy better sound to the receiver than my 5k gaming rig and its annoying, and the receiver switches sound modes automatically based on content. Any ideas?

 

I have been looking for this for years now. For sending Hi Res DSD audio to my Yamaha RX-A2A. I can send stereo to it via network / DLNA and it sound amazing. I have a GTX 970 Video card and have one Display port to my TV (I think I use a Display port to HDMI cable) and the same from another Display port to my receiver. My issue is that there does not seem to be a way to send DSD over HDMI to get the multi-Channel Hi Res Music. So I have to lived with my Multi-Channel stuff being converted to PCM 24 / 192. I know that is supposed to be not detectable in terms of different sound but to me there is a pretty big difference. I have also done some AB comparisons with friends and they hear quite a big difference as well. Especially when playing the 5.1 DSD direct from disc (Oppo BDP-83 or my Sony UBP-800M2). The stuff converted to PCM 24/192 via JRiver just does not have the same crisp clarity that the DSD has. Maybe my GTX970 or Jriver MC (Currently on version 29), is just not up to the task or something but there is absolutely a difference in sound quality. With all the audiophiles in the world you would think someone would make a PCIe HDMI sound card. (I have an older Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 but it is the older PCI. Not PCie My Current board , Asus ROG STRIX, does not have any PCI slots.) Not sure if it would have done the DSD output or not as I was not into trying that the last time I had it installed in a system. If anyone finds a solution I would love to hear it. I have looked into DAC's as well but none of them seem to be able to do multi-channel DSD. Only stereo. Actually I did find a few that claimed they might be able to do it. But they start at a ridiculous $3500 - $4000! Ridiculous just to go from stereo to multi-channel! Carl.

 

Why not do analog: 3.5mm cables from motherboard to RCA on back of receiver?
Real question, as I too am battling with this issue, and I think this is the simplest solution. As I understand it, this way still does 24/192, which is the best you can get, right? If your motherboard doesn't have the connections, get a soundcard, no?
What am I missing?

 

Why not do analog: 3.5mm cables from motherboard to RCA on back of receiver? Real question, as I too am battling with this issue, and I think this is the simplest solution. As I understand it, this way still does 24/192, which is the best you can get, right? If your motherboard doesn't have the connections, get a soundcard, no? What am I missing?

For one. My receiver does not have 6 or 8 analogue inputs for all the channels. 2. 24 / 192 is not really the "Best you can get" In fact I can already get 24 / 192 in PCM via HDMI in both stereo and Multi-Channel. it is only the best you can get via Video Card's HDMI and that only because for some reason they don't have proper drivers to pass through DSD over HDMI to the receiver. For instance PC's can get much higher resolutions via USB DAC (Up to 32 / 384) but a Multi-Channel USB DAC starts at around $4000 and at that level won't solve the problem because most of those output via Analogue as well. The fact is that my SACD Player is capable of passing DSD via HDMI and the receiver receives and decodes the signal up to DSD512 for Stereo and DSD256 for Multi-Channel. So it is definitely possible we just need an HDMI Sound Card with the proper drivers. I keep getting told that their is not enough Audiophile market for the PC Manufacturer's to bother with this but I don't believe that is true. If that were the case they wouldn't be bothering with 8K TV's. I don't see a lot of people jumping up and down for those either. Certainly there are more audiophiles interested in a high end sound card that can produce the quality of sound we are looking for than there are looking for 8K TV's. Carl

 

Ah, thanks for the lesson.
In my search for a sound card with HDMI, I only found stuff/articles reviewing such cards from back around the year 2009. So at the very least, they use to make them. I wonder why they stopped.
I didn't even consider that some receivers don't have multi-channel analog inputs. Right after that last post of mine, I went to the store and got some 3.5mm to RCA cables, and I must say, it sounds fantastic. I wish I had known about this possibility 12+ years ago when I bought this receiver and built my first PC; I wouldn't have had to deal with toslink or fake second or third monitors this past decade. This is such a much simpler solution with fantastic audio quality.

I'm with you though, I think an HDMI sound card is much more desirable than an 8K TV. I've had a 4K TV for years and years, and I'm just now starting to view 4K content. I just didn't care; 1080P is still just fine with me. But I just got a much bigger TV and 4K content is kind of more "needed" than before. You can actually tell a difference from the distance that I sit from the TV vs my previous TV.

 

I found a partial solution to this. See my thread here. Basically I found with VLC and presumably other programs, you can take control of the sound output and send your receiver a bitstream which it can then decode correctly. HDMI/SPDIF passthrough was the audio setting I found on VLC.

4k120 receiver between PC/Display

I've got a bit of an uncommon setup. Z690 + 3080ti +++ rig outputting HDMI to my 87" 4k120 LG TV via a Marantz SR5015 (7.2 speaker system) It "works" but I am unsatisfied with the sound quality. A $20 Chromecast sounds better on this receiver. I turned off all win 11 sound enhancements and...

www.overclock.net

 

I just purchased a ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme motherboard with Nvidia 4090 running Windows 11 for my new gaming PC. I am trying to understand how to get the ATMOS signal out of my gaming PC to my Denon AVR-X3800H to use all 7.2 channel receiver? The entire reason is to be able to hear the games I play in full ATMOS but using a 4K 240 FPS monitor not a TV. How do I connect the PC to the Denon (1) how do i use the audio connectors on the back of the motherboard or (2) the Nvidia 4090 HDMI out to AV receiver for just the audio) (3) is there another option? to connect to my Denon 7.2 AV receiver so I can get full Atmos sound for the games I play? I will use the DisplayPort to my monitor to get 240FPS at 4K (I cant use the AV receiver's 4K /120FPS as my monitor supports 4K @ 240FPS). I am using a monitor not a TV so eARC is not possible. What is the preferred way to get the best audio / ATMOS from my PC to my AV receiver from my gaming PC while using DisplayPort from PC to monitor. My Nvidia 4090 does have two HDMI ports. I got to think this is a very common gaming PC requirement? If this is not the right place to ask this type of question, where would be the right place? Thanks for your assistance

 

Only soundcard I know off that had HDMI out was THIS but it was discontinued for some reason, you might find one on eBay second hand

 

you may be able to use a pcie breakout box. BlackMagic used to make one iirc.

 

just going to throw these products out there since i don't think they've been mentioned:
hdfury 8k arcana vrr 40gbps
hdfury 8k vrroom 40gbps
depending on your needs/inputs. requires a bit of config, but nothing too crazy. my use case was connecting my pc and ps5 to my 4k monitor with VRR, but also wanting atmos/surround for my sonos set up.

 

I randomly landed on this thread and thought I would share my Setup, some of you might find this as a better solution to what I have seen in this thread.

My PC : Asus Z790 Dark Hero/Asus 4090 Strix OC

I use a 55" OLED LG G4 TV as my "monitor" it has eARC

I use a Marantz Cinema 30 Surround sound A/V reciever 11.4 channels 4K120 or 8K60 on all hdmi inputs (Dolby Atmos and DTS X capable)

All my HDMI cables are Club3D CAC-1372 Certified 48Gbps hdmi 2.1, 4K120/8K60 capable

Here is where my setup differs, I use an OREI HDMI MATRIX
(This is very VERY different than and HDMI splitter)

1. HDMI cable from the 4090 to Input#2 of the OREI MATRIX

2. HDMI cable from Output#2 of the OREI MATRIX to the desired HDMI input of the Marantz
(in marantz settings you must select "8K Enhanced" for your video inputs)
(The 8K Enhanced setting is what allows the Marantz to passthrough 4K120 or 8K60 from the PC)
(The OREI MATRIX will passthrough the device ID of "GEFORCE RTX 4090" to the Marantz automatically and it will name that HDMI input as such, you can change this in Marantz settings)

3. HDMI cable from the Primary output of the Marantz to a NON eARC input on the TV
(In Windows your "Monitor" will be named Marantz AVR but there will only be a single "Monitor")

4. HDMI cable from the eARC port of the TV to an eARC input port of the Marantz
(So that audio from the built in apps like netflix on the TV can send audio to the surround reciever)

5. (Optional) Since the OREI MATRIX has an additional HDMI output (non-eARC) you can use this as an Audio-Only HDMI output if you have both OREI outputs select the same input source of input#2 (4090) and because it will be "Cloning" that source to both outputs because it is an HDMI MATRIX Switch it will Force the audio to a non-display device such as a soundbar.

This is not the only configuration of input/outputs that will work it is just how mine is and I have other devices to consider (a windows based NAS/render machine, A Gaming PC, A Mac, A PS5, Xbox ect).
I admit that my setup is a tad...extreme, and expensive, however if all the devices in the chain support the propper HDMI versions (2.1/2.0 ect) then this should work for you, but it is the OREI MATRIX Switch that is the key here and that by itself is not that expensive ($130)

I can play games at 4K120 and send full surround sound and even Dolby ATMOS from games that support it directly to my AVR, I can run Windows 11 at 120hz with 10bit HDR, I can even Play UHD Bluray Rips with K-lite codec pack/MPC-HC with full HDR/HDR10+/DolbyVision and ATMOS or DTS-X support and it all passes through correctly to all devices in the chain.

 

Yes that would be a good setup, however my main display uses displayport , and it doesn't have ARC.. It would be beneficial if new monitors came with HDMI ARC, because we want 144+hz monitors and passing that through an AVR won't work. Maybe when I upgrade the monitor at some point and it has 4k 240hz over HDMI and I can do a passthrough AVR but the AVR splits the audio out, that would work, but I haven't investigated that yet. Right now my setup is using HDMI to AVR for audio only and displayport to my main monitor. It works perfectly fine but it's just super annoying that windows has a 2nd monitor showing.
Another solution would be if windows had an option to turn off the monitor part in the OS and only send audio out there, which would be wonderful, but it doesn't. It should be relatively easy to implement, I mean it would still send a video signal out there since hdmi requires it, but it would be basically a black screen and then the audio.
To fix my HDCP problem i had to buy another AVR that supported 4k /8k .. Luckily they aren't expensive now. My original problem was that when I plugged in my old AVR to the hdmi, since it supported the older HDCP version, i couldn't play any HDCP content on my 4k monitor , frustrating... now that the new avr supports the hdcp 1.2 or whatever the new version is that allows 4k, it works fine, but still has the annoyance of windows randomly moving to the other monitor which doesn't have a monitor when my main monitors goes to sleep mode.
Audio on PC is still extremely frustrating, plus it also has huge delays. There's a noticeable delay sending over hdmi to the avr even in direct mode, i think this is just crappy windows audio though and no games have direct atmos or dts support, they use the software encoder in windows which makes the delay. Even in direct multi channel mode there's still a delay, albeit less of one. In games this is upwards of 200ms.
It seems like direct analog audio is still the best for gaming on PC no matter how much I try and get this to work correctly , never figured out how to completely remove the delay.