[Raytestrak]

@ Raytestrak
asuming you are running your audio via hdmi through the ATI card....i agree with DDDamian
read my long winded post earlier in the tread...you might want to avoid the realtek altogeather and disable it in the bios

ATI/AMD does have alot of junk in there that you can exclude from the install (that you have to manually exclude EVERY Damn time) but the the core of it i have found helpful (recently) with my HTPC builds...im a nvidia convert...atleast for HTPCs

@rkismet. The AMD HDMI audio device is built by Realtek,so it's the only audio device I have (Foxconn NT-A3500 barebone). Disabling is not an option
The realtek drivers are capable of playing HD audio, Daniela build proves that, but I'll try the AMD drivers tomorrow. Like DDDamien says, the audio drivers are small and Windows 8 has pretty decent driver management, a rollback is easily done and so is an uninstall of the AMD drivers should I want to do that.

For anyone who's interested: If you extract the installer with 7zip, the drivers are located in \$_OUTDIR\Packages\Drivers. WDM for audio and Display for ... display (thank you Captain Obvious). You then have a 76MB set of basic drivers instead of 206MB of drivers and utilities and services.

In the past I needed CCC for overscan only, but now that I can turn on overscan via the registry I only want the drivers.

Edit:
Okay, I've had my sleep. Installed the AMD audio drivers, HD audio works fine in AE now. BUT, with these drivers my Onkyo switches to analog the second it doesn't receive input from my HTPC. So every time I push my remote, the receiver has to switch back to hdmi/digital before I hear anything. This is not an AE issue, it happens in Windows too. Has anyone else heard of or experiences this?