Our good old CRT television died last week. Suddenly, without any warning, it refused to start up. So I decided to shop for a LCD television. I chose for a Samsung 81" TV. No full HD, cause I still use DVB-T as the primary TV-signal source. However, connecting my HTPC to the TV by composite signal gave a bad image quality. Connecting with a SCART was even worse. So I decided that it was a good moment to try out HDMI, which gave a perfect image, but alas without sound.


I first checked the BIOS, as it gives an option to enable or disable HDMI sound. It seemed to be enabled, so I had to look for another reason for the absence of the HDMI HD audio device in Windows. Finally, I found that one needs to update the ATI HD sound driver in order to create the RealTek HDMI sound output. Here’s a link to realtek’s driver download for HDMI. Download "ATI HDMI Audio Device ", install it, and after reboot, select in the Windows Audio setup the Realtek HD audio device as the default device. After that, you're ready to rumble.