VIA Technologies reiterated its plans to enable high-quality integrated audio on mainboards by announcing that Albatron and Chaintech decided to utilise VIA Envy24PT audio solution on their mainboards. Even though there are now only two mainboards to integrate a quality and feature-rich audio, I believe there will be more of them in future.

Both Albatron PXE865E Pro II (see this news-story) and Chaintech 9CJS Zenith (see this news-story) are equipped with the VIA Envy24PT sound-chip as well as appropriate codecs and software allowing quality 7.1 (8-channel) audio.

Envy24 series of audio controllers boasts with 24-bit resolution with 96KHz sampling rates, and multi-channel 36-bit wide digital mixer. VIA Envy24PT chip supports 8-channel audio, the latest DVD-Video Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES soundtrack as well as has 4 simultaneous inbound channels.

Based on our own VIA Envy24 review I can say that the solution is just a very quality one when implemented properly. Provided that the software support and stability is on a high level, I suppose that manufacturers of cheap and not-so-cheap sound-cards do really have something to worry about because more mainboard makers will follow Albatron and Chaintech.