Azalia HD - Intel Audio Studio

This post is in part to report what I have found about, to ask THG to post an intensive test on it, and to receive info from you the other members.

I just bought an Intel Motherboard D955XBK, quite happy with it by now.
I own a Pioneer VSX-d912k (all DTS and AC3 formats support)

What I have found about Intel HD and Intel Audio Studio

1) Has an awful latency, running with "Dolby Digital Live" (which forces the output config to 5.1 (In the Intel Audio Studio" control panel and re-codes any output that comes from games, WMP or whatever to AC3 and send it through SPDIF

2) It forces your Windows Audio Control Panel Speaker Layout to 7.1 at startup (yes, each time you boot) //you can change it to 5.1 later each time// but if Intel Audio Studio is in the tray (loaded) then it will change it back to 7.1 again (right after you press OK button, enter the Speaker Layout again and it's back to 7.1)

The problem with this is:
You want to play Doom3 with Surround mode. Then, if the Speaker layout is configured to 7.1 the game won't switch to surround mode.

I haven't tried it IN GAME, but works for the intro presentation at least. (disabling the panel and manually setting speakers to 5.1)

I couldn't try how it behaves using other game titles or serious audio software yet.

3) Driver problems.

a) Running Doom3 it takes a long time to start audio when the ID presentation starts. Weirdly it's muted until you click a mouse button. The rest of the time it works

b) Running NFSU2, press ALT+TAB to go back to Windows Desktop and it will play "noise" of what's left in the buffer like old drivers or DOS games that hanged or didn't cleared something after exiting.

Only when something else is sent to the audio card, it clears.

c) Running MS Rallisport Challenge, engine sound is garbled high pitch, the rest of the sounds are OK. Sometimes it works, and it's weird.
(in Rallisport Readme there are many references to Lower the Acceleration in the DirectX config for lots of audio cards, and ask to install latest drivers, anyway my old Turtle Beach Santa Cruz did an excelent job with full accel)

I have a Pentium D 820 processor and nVidia 6600 PCI-E card.

Clean install of Windows XP SP2 (included at install, not patched) with all updates from WindowsUpdate). All drivers installed cleanly with the latest version from Intel. No updates done.

I have contacted Intel support but all they answer is "Uninstall drivers, clean BIOS, download new drivers, install them" <- Stupid answer

So this is the actual picture. Still I had another mobo before and had to buy the above mentioned TB SC since the SPDIF of the mobo was awful and didn't sounded for more than 2 seconds before the noise made the receiver stop the stream until good data came back.

Now that I've seen there are new boards from Bluegears (http://www.bluegears.com) and others with CMIxxxx ICs and they have DTS Connect (live DTS encoding //love DTS hate AC3//) I'm considering getting one of those.

Regards.

EDIT: I've posted CMIxxxx were the same found in Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which is wrong. CMI are made by C-Media (http://www.cmedia.com) and the Turtle Beach has Cirrus Logic Crystal CSxxxx (http://www.cirrus.com)

C-Media are widely used in motherboards and they usually have awful sound and even worst drivers and control panels. (still the BlueGears is maybe a good product).