Self fulfilling prophecies.

By far the great majority of the nForce2 boards I dealt with, in my system and in others', had SoundStorm and it was in use. Contrast that with the available selection of NF2 boards from a major retailer. Let's use CompUsa, since I work there and have first-hand knowledge of the items in stock...

What's in the mobo display case, you ask? Why, sh***y A7N8X non-Deluxe boards with garbage AC97 of course! Why? Because they were **THREE DOLLARS** cheaper than the Deluxe, and our clueless purchasers decided that second NIC and good sound was in no way worth THREE MEASLY BUCKS......

THIS and THIS ALONE is why so many SoundStorm-less nForce2 boards get sold. The purchasers for the masses have NO FRIGGIN CLUE and order cheap over quality EVERY TIME.

I used to tell customers about how lovely my A7N8X Deluxe hooked to my Z-680s sounded. A few checked it out themselves and were and are well pleased. When they came back looking for a K8 or P4 board with similar sound abilities, they left with NOTHING, since our good friends in the mass market have screwed things up for us.

If you miss SoundStorm, go thank whomever makes the buying decisions for your local hardware megachain. They are responsible 100%.

How comes that SPDIF == Soundstorm?

Well, technically speaking. The DD Encoding, which really is Soundstorm, is pretty pointless wihtout S/PDIF and a DD Decoder.

So anyone who has used Soundstorm without S/PDIF and a DD Decoder really hasn't used Soundstorm.

http://www.petitiononline.com/NVAPU/

its been around for ages

but only 2000 odd have bothered to sign it

Still no source to this "news". I'm thinking someone here is talking out of their arse in order to save face. Unless of course the link below is made up...
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2175

I certainly see an Audio Controller with SPDIF out on that chipset diagram...

For your pleasure: (Hope I'm not spamming)
http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/SoundStorm_5.1/NVIDIA_SoundSto...

Where do these Taiwanese companies get their data from? They feel its not needed? 95% of the people that bought nForce2 boards bought it FOR soundstorm... retards.

NForce 4 won't have Soundstorm. Soundstorm is years-old tech.

The Nforce 4 chipset will instead support Soundstorm 2!

"Dolby Digital 5.1 compliant and it will be able to do EX effects at 20 GFlops processing power. Soundstorm 2 supports 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 speaker configurations."
Source: http://the-inquirer.net/?article=17058

However, I think this TR followup article is basically saying that Soundstorm 2 has been canceled/withheld/just fictional. But that 2 week old Inquirer article made me excited about NF4!

Whether there is truth in this rumour or not, only time will tell.

However, regardless of the features added to future Nforce chipsets, if they lack the audio capabilities of the APU and Dolby Digital encoding, I will not be purchasing a platform based on them.

could we influence nVidia to release it as a separate add-in card?

I hope someone will put up an online petition to bring SoundStorm back. I'm sick of Creative Labs being the only choice, and having questionable customer service. I bought my MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR (perhaps not certified, but it has the hardware) because it had SoundStorm, letting me give up my Creative Audigy card. I don't want a cheesey onboard system that lacks hardware acceleration and quality sound. If NVidia is going to drop SoundStorm, I'd rather go back to mainboards that have no sound at all, so I don't have to pay extra when I'm going to go out and buy a sound card anyway.

One other thing to consider: This really removes a lot of distinction between NVidia and VIA chipset mainboards. There's a lot less reason not to choose a VIA chipset board next time around, especially if they start using the not-perfect-but-livable Envy 24HT solutions on them.

So is there a source to this "news" item or is this just rumor?

I dunno what you guys are on about. The Asus A7N8X mated the nForce2 APU to a crappy DAC to produce mediocre sound quality:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q1/shuttle-sn41g2/index.x?pg=6

Listen to various audio implementations side by side, and the reality becomes very clear. Sure, the nForce2 APU's DSP units were nice for performance, but the audio itself was typically not very good. Fear the crab!

I once was mad at Creative. I told everyone dont buy their products etc. Now I just slap an Audigy2 in and forget about it. There are far worse things in life that I choose to live with and far more sinister companies to avoid. Damn, some people talk of Creative like they are a company responsible for the death of many people. When all they are guilty of is is being good businessmen. Ohh, I know you call the lawsuits and buying up the competition evil but patent law is huge. Everyone does it, including precious, champion of everything good and wholsome, AMD.

NF4 wont really be kick ass anymore as compared to other chipsets, because of the on-die cache of the A64 mem controller. Also, you can still manage a small overclock amyway even without AGP-PCI lock, and a small overclock is really where you want to be anyway for stability in games. Without soundstorm the nVIDA chipset has lost the edge over the competition nearly altogether imho. Soundstorm would have been improved too with a better DAC and better sheilding. They sould have paid cmedia for the rights to the new 24 bit dac, and used it, and combined with SPDIF with soundstorm would have again tumbled creatives a$$. One hope though for sound alone- really is the CMI 24 bit dac that some of the new boards use, but without being coupled with soundstorm no way it will outsell creative A2ZS. Now, the people that might have bought a nVIDA board might go for the more stable VIA boards with the new 8768 DAC @ 24 Bit. I think SIS should think about getting into the soundcard/onboard sound scene. Even if the SIS 755 and future 939 boards are a tad slower really good onboard sound might payoff. Perhaps they can buy the rights to NVIDA's soundstorm and use it to test the market :) nVIDA made a bad move by not continuing the soundstorm imo because for practial purposes having onboard firewall (hardware) imo is no good because most higher end enthusiasts that would buy advanced NF3-4 mobos use routers anyway - some with 802.11G and have no need for dual lan's and onboard firwalls, and buggy NVraid. How about an nforce4 board with a single gigabit NIC, soundstorm with an advanced DAC, and a more refined NVraid, and no onboard firewall. That's the board I would want.

It's a sad news but totally understandable.

Nvidia's hardware firewall isn't even included on many boards, with Gigabyte and Shuttle adding separate gig-e chipsets, not to mention possible others. Now think how many companies would opt to pay for Soundstrom 2 over some cheap audio solution.

The loss of Soundstorm doesn't seem to bad especially now that the new AC3Filter (beta) now supports Dolby Digital encoding.

Damage,

5 letters for you - SPDIF!

I've git Abit NF7-S, bought "only" because of SoundStorm. What a pite that NVIDIA won't continue this great product. NV mad nForce and SS because they worked on Xbox, now they don't... maybe here is the reason?

Bummer. With Turtle Beach effectively bowing out of the "enthusiast" soundcard market, Envy24's CPU-cycle-sucking drivers, and now nVidia declining to support Soundstorm on their new chipsets, it looks like there aren't any good alternatives to Creative if you want decent sound and best gaming performance.

If anyone had a chance at driving a stake into the heart of the Creative soundcard monopoly, it was nVidia. They had a good product, and enough clout that Creative couldn't just buy them out (or sue them over some alleged patent breach) to eliminate the competition.

When people ask which is better ATI or nVidia it's the high end that's compared first, even though very little of the market is based there. even if they offered soundstorm on one of their chipsets (ultra/sli/pro whatever moniker you want) it would still hit the market with enough force to cause people to believe that all of their products are better.

I wonder how many people bought the A7N8X deluxe just for the soundstorm certification (that sealed the deal for me... free $60 sound card)

I read somewhere that the mb makers aren't willing to pay any more for a chipset with soundstorm than one with whatever other kinds of crappy audio, so the fact that we want it doesn't matter much as nVidia sells chipsets to the mb makers and not us directly, so it's understandable from their point of view. Sad, though.

Soundstorm was one of the best features of the NForce 2...
I can't believe Nvidia isn't including this. I don't know how much more research/money it costs to just keep the soundstorm updated and recent, but how much could it hurt to just have it available, maybe as a bonus feature on SOME chipsets?

I guess it's not really practical... but a lot of people really like soundstorm, myself included. I hate creative (crackling, bad drivers, retardedly overpriced) and since I got my Fortissimo 2 I haven't looked back.

..np for me...will try to grab one of the last Nforce2 mobos for my oldie Athlon 1.1 Ghz (yes)....

hope to start a thread on the forum b4 weekend when I expect to made my decision...

/hopes you can understand what I said !

This is incredibly shortsighted. If nothing else, it would be a wonderful feature for a "Pro" board. I was willing to pay for it on my A7N8X, I thought it was a pretty highly desired feature.

Terrible news. Nforce 4 should still be a kick ass platform in any case.