Another new feature is digital audio processing. If you've ever used an earlier ATI product such as a TV Wonder or an All-In-Wonder, or a competitors TV tuner product, you would have noticed that audio is sent through a loop-back cable to your soundcards Line-In or Microphone jack. This would obviously cause problems if you wanted to use those jacks for something else, but the bigger issue with this type of setup is that it often is the cause of poor audio and video synchronization caused by delays within the sound card.

These problems no longer exist with the Elite because along with the video, the audio stream is passed directly into the Theater 550 Pro chip, digitized with a 12-bit analog to digital decoder, and send internally over the data bus to the soundcard ensuring that video and audio are 100% in sync at all times.