Audio Testing

The ASRock H370M-ITX/ac uses the older Realtek ALC892 CODEC for audio duties. I was impressed to see a fair bit of electrical isolation provided to the CODEC in the motherboard's circuit design.

Audio testing provided some weird results. I normally test by using a loopback cable plugged into the green output plug and then back into the blue Line-In port, and then set up RMAA to use those inputs for testing. It is quite normal for audio playback levels to be set to roughly 66 percent or so after a fresh OS install, making it normal for me to either have to adjust the output levels or the recording volume so that the actual output of the CODEC is tested properly. That means I'll adjust the volume output to its maximum (if you understand how audio playback really works, volume controls are more a brake than an booster) to then see the changes reflected in RMAA's pre-test GUI, allowing me to tune things right to the limit of the CODEC's capabilities. However, with this board, as I adjusted output levels up, it turned them back down a bit by lowering the recording volume. This is some sort of attenuation feature built into the driver to help eliminate potential issues and was nice to see, but it did affect the test results negatively. You can see that the frequency response is great, but most of the rest of the results fail to make the grade compared to many other offerings I have tested recently, even though the actual audio playback showed things to be far different. So please take these results with a grain of salt; the board is actually capable of far better than this result shows. In the end, it's not like these results are terrible or anything, but they definitely do not represent what my ears heard. The RMAA test results are below:

RightMark Audio Analyzer