0Windows volume control of HDMI output

I recently swapped out my old home cinema audio sys­tem (a Yamaha DSP-E800 and a Den­on ste­reo receiv­er) con­nec­ted via USB DAC and 6 chan­nel ana­log for an Onkyo TX-SR605 which has HDMI audio con­nec­tions. In most ways this was an instant upgrade but one issue really frus­trated me — volume…

I was used to hav­ing the amp­li­fi­ers set at a fixed volume and adjust­ing the level via the PC (Win­dows 10) volume con­trol. How­ever with HDMI it seems this does­n’t work. The win­dows volume con­trol does noth­ing at all. Googling pro­duced no use­ful res­ults, just lots of people who can­’t get HDMI out­put to work at all — a clas­sic example of how much worse google has got at find­ing rel­ev­ant res­ults now that every com­mer­cially backed web­site has found ways to game it.

It seems the issue is that win­dows can­’t con­trol the volume for any­thing bit­streamed. But my new amp­li­fi­er accepts mul­tichan­nel LPCM so what I want to do is decode any dolby or DTS formats on the PC, con­trol their volume, and then send them as LPCM to the amp.

Thanks to a piece of soft­ware I used pre­vi­ously to remap chan­nels I have been able to do exactly that, and get con­trol again. That soft­ware is called “Equal­izer APO”. Just install it and enable it for your HDMI out­put and then reboot. One oth­er thing is needed for some pro­grams — Go into the clas­sic “con­trol pan­el” and open the sound options. Bring up the prop­er­ties for your HDMI out­put and then go to the advanced tab. Untick “Allow applic­a­tions to take exclus­ive con­trol of this device”.

The final thing I had to do was to change the default power on volume on the Onkyo — which had been set to 45. I changed it to remem­ber the pre­vi­ous. The set­ting is found in Set­tings -> 6. Misc -> Volume Setup -> Power on Volume