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Intro
For those of you new to this thread: Hello! I'm Arkangyl, I'm a Computer Engineer (which means I know Electrical Engineering too) and I've done quite a bit of reading & research into computer audio. This thread is meant to be an introduction into computer audio for all.
For those of you following update: I've tweaked the format to make it more readable, I hope I didn't cut out too much of my original sass & literary prose in process :-P
Part I: Sound & Speaker Basics
A basic primer in how audio works is probably the best place to start this whole thing since without a good basis of understanding it will be hard to explain the higher level concepts. First, we'll do this with bullets:
- Sound is air moving at a given frequency (general range: 0 to 25,000+ Hz).
- You process sound by your brain interperting how your eardrum vibrates.
- Loudspeakers (what we call speakers, same thing) make sound by using magnets to move some material (aluminum, paper, synthetic) which in turn moves the air thus creating a 'sound'
Now to break things down further, there are three basic types of loudspeakers: sub-woofers, woofers / drivers, and tweeters.
Tweeters are responsible for frequencies ranging from [typically] 2 kHz to 20 kHz(good tweeters will hit 24 kHz, the uber ones can break into the 30 kHz range). They are generally 1/4" to 1" in size and come in quite a few different variants, wikipedia (tweeters) covers the different types pretty well. All tweeters have the same general design and goal though: to move very, very quickly to create the 'high' notes typically this is done with a cone (1/4 to 3/4" woofer optimized for high frequencies) or a dome ('dome' of material over the magnet).
Woofers handle the lower frequencies, generally from 55 Hz up to 2 kHz. They overlap in coverage with the subwoofer but their purpose is to create location & display the sound. Typical woofers range from 3 to 5 1/4" in size and are made from modern polymers (rubber-like substances), paper and Kevlar are also somewhat common. These low & mid range frequencies generally require a larger size (5.25" is a good size) to move enough air to push them out.
Subwoofers deal with the low frequencies, generally you'll see 30 - 150 Hz , and are 8-15" in size. Subwoofers are just larger woofers with a lower range, they operate relatively slowly and move a lot of air so you feel the sound. A good subwoofer will recover quickly from its last sound thus allowing each note to be a distinct sound, bad subwoofers can't respond that quickly and will mush notes together and muddy the music.
Here's a good illustration of how a speaker works (re-hosted from Wikipedia's loudspeaker / woofer / subwoofer page, re-posted under GNU Free Documentation License)
Crossovers (lowpass / highpass filters) are also important to understand, when your computer sends out its audio signal, that signal (all cables coming out of the soundcard) have ALL the frequencies on them. Your various speakers, as mentioned, are each focused on a seperate range and will pretty much output crap if you don't specify what range should reach them. That's where a Crossover comes in, they are basic circuits that filter out the unwanted frequencies. There will be a crossover in the speaker between the inputs and woofer & tweeter AND one going into the subwoofer. All speakers have an ideal operational range, crossovers should be designed based around speaker specifications.
The general design is: voltage_in -> resistor -> voltage_out AND capacitor to ground.
The equation is cutoff_frequency = 1 / (2 * pi * R * C)
Crossovers (filters) can be built in combination with amplifiers too in order to boost the 'good' frequencies at the same time as you cut off the 'bad' ones.
The Box, the actual box the speaker is encased in seems to be overlooked by newbies and obsessed over by DIYers. Good speakers and commonly made with 3/4" MDF, glued at every seam (no nails or screws). The goal of a box is to NOT make any noise while the speaker is doing its thing. The box should not vibrate and the airpath (air comes in through a 'baffle' or that hole in your speaker
) should be clear as if the air makes a lot of noise rustling around the box to get to the woofer / tweeter, you can hear it!
Soundstage, this is a fancy term referring to what everything sounds like when you're sitting there listening to your speakers. In short, a good 2.0 / 2.1 setup will create a better soundstage than a bad 5.1 setup. This means that 2 speakers will sound more like surround sound than 5 speakers will. There's a lot of fancy science here, but in short it has to do with accurately re-creating the sounds & how they're projected into a room. Much like a good ventriloquist can make it appear that people on the other side of the room are talking, a good 2.0 setup can make it seem like the sound is all around you
Specifications, I think speakers are about the only thing people around here buy without fully understanding the specifications. Most people look at power, inputs, and the stickers, and that's about it, but there is oh so much more to consider!
THD (total harmonic distortion), is a measure of distortion of the harmonic frequencies (harmonics are multiples of the fundamental frequency), these distortions are generally rather low (according to specs, all Swan & Onkyo systems are 1% or lower, Logitech is at 10% though!) and not perceived by the human ear (for most of us, the difference between 1% and .8% isn't worth paying for)
SNR (signal to noise ratio), is signal strength relative to background noise (SNR = 20*[log base 10](V signal / V noise)), the high the SNR the better, however know that 40 dB is VERY good and around 80 dB will be enough for most people as we're talking about very minor levels of distorion (Swan says they're north of 80 dB, Logitech says 93.5 dB, Onkyo says 100 dB)
RMS power, ahh, RMS versus peak power. The short & sweet explanation is that RMS is the power the systems going to be capable of, and peak is a sort of one-time maximum. RMS is what you care about. (Logitech = 505w, Swan M10 = 40w, Onkyo = 700w). Also look at watts per channel rather than just overall system power to compare 5.1 to 2.1 and 2.0.
Part II: The Digital Birth (audio files)
As I'm sure you've discerned from part 1, sound is an analog electrical ciruit. You're comput is a digital beast, and that's how you're music starts the grand process journey from your hard drive to your ears. There are many, many different formats to store your music in. To be honest I'm only familiar with a few, so if I miss any: post about them, share your knowledge too!
mp3 according to the RIAA the mp3 is the bane of the music industry (NO soapboxes about this stuff here though!!!). What's most important to understand is that the mp3 was made to make an audio file as small as possible and is a lossy compression, it was then expanded to also compress music and leave it sounding good :-P. I'm sure we've all seen the different options for compression, you can rip at different bit-rates, different sample rates, and a few other options. First of all, CD's have a sample rate of 44.1 kHz so that's really what you ought be using (sample rate is the # of samples taken per second, think of it as how many datapoints used to make a line in excel). Stereo bit rate is simply how many bits are used per second of music, more bps means better quality, iTunes defines good as 128 kbs and their top setting as 192 kbs. iTunes music is NOW 256 kbs AAC (I'll explain AAC later) which is actually pretty damn good, nice improvement Apple
AAC AAC is what Apple uses, and that's probably where you'll mainly encounter it. AAC is sort of mp3 version 2.0, in general it sounds better as the compression / de-compression techniques are better, however it is still a lossy compression. AAC also allows for DRM.
FLAC is a lossless audio compression, meaning that nothing gets lost on playback from the original. This however, takes up MUCH more space on your hard drive (see chart below), however flac is still a 40-50% reduction from the un-compressed size!
-Lossy and Lossless compressions are exactly what they sound like: lossy means some data is lost (but it's good enough to be considered useful), lossless means the un-compressed version is the same as the original.
for comparison, here are file sizes for a 5 minute song in different formats (mp3's & aac's are bitrate then sample rate)
mp3 128 / 44.1 == 4.7mb
mp3 192 / 44.1 == 6.8mb
mp3 320 / 44.1 == 11.3mb
aac 128 / 44.1 == 5.4mb
aac 256 / 44.1 == ??? (don't have any yet, guessing ~13mb)
flac == 122mb :-D
Dolby Digital Yep, Dolby Digital is an audio format (AC-3) which is a lossy compression supporting up to 6 channels of sound. For in-depth information go here
DTS An alternative to Dolby Digital, it is owned by DTS Inc.
THX, THX is NOT an audio format like DD and DTS, rather it is a 'quality standard' of which there are many levels. THX in a movie theater is very different from THX on home media because in a theater, THX Inc. provides special crossover circuitry so there is something being 'sold', for everything else it's really nothing more than something for the marketing people to throw around. Remember, THX is from George Lucas (sort of) and he gave us Jar-Jar Binks, 'quality' is relative here...
Part III: Going from bits to a wave
Now we're going to connect part 1 (the speaker) to part 2 (the data)! Isn't this just super-exciting? Don't you wish your textbooks would occasionally ask if you were having fun? Weee.
Digital audio becomes analog audio through a cryptically named device: the DAC (digital to analog converter).
The inputs AND outputs of a DAC are low-voltage (remember, computers use really small voltages), we want them to be big voltages so they're nice and loud, for that we use an amplifier (amp) which simply turns .001 volts into 10 volts without changing anything else about the signal (well, sort of...).
The DAC and AMP(s) can make or break a system. You can get them really cheap (integrated sound card) or spend hundreds of dollars for just the DAC. I suggest reading around on Head-Fi and A/V Science (AVS) as both boards have thousands of threads on DACS & AMPs (as do we!).
A good DAC will accurately translate digital into analog, it sounds simple but the circuit to do so gets quite complex.
A good AMP will transparently improve volume (no distortion as you crank it up to 11 :-D).
The science going on here comes in two flavors, the first is power cleanliness. Poor power, that is power which has many ripples and fluxuations in itself will pass those imperfections into the system and you will hear those imperfections as they distort your music. The second piece that you're paying for is for the rest of the system to also be clean.
Acceptable tolerances in an electrical circuit are usually pretty high (relatively), also a perfectly clean circuit is almost impossible to find as there will always be some, very very minor, imperfection. This is where quality of components, most noteable capacitors, op-amps, and dacs come in. The good ones cost money, mostly because they are far more rare. Think a Ferrari engine versus a Toyota engine, both are good, one is legen-wait_for_it-dary.
DAC A DAC does it's thing the same way we record audio to the computer (but in reverse), it will take a certain number of samples and use those as the points on a graph, the resulting line is the analog signal they gets produced. A better DAC can handle more samples and produce a better, more consistent waveform, mostly though you're paying for a DAC that can handle more samples per second. You'll also encounter THD here (total harmonic distortion) which is a percentage representing the amount of distortion in the signal, along with dynamic range which is the delta between the largest and smallest signals the DAC can output at once, measured in dB. A good DAC will have a THD under .005% (really freaking small) and a dynamic range of over 100 dB, meaning it will create both the really loud sound of the singer and the really quiet sound of the background cymbals resonating.
AMP AMPs have the same statistics as DACs as they can distort and limit the sound in the same ways. It's important to remember that any time we alter the electrical signal, we can completely change how the music sounds. Money here buys you cleanliness and the ability to turn it to 11, because 11 is 1 more than 10!
Audio Processor This is that nifty thing in your computer, the X-Fi or Xonar or Realtek 889A. It does a myrid number of things, from EAX to OpenAL to DTS & DD. The general chain of events is audio signal -> audio processor -> digital output -> DAC -> amp -> speaker so a sound card WILL be used somewhat even with digial outputs.
*Using the S/PDIF (optical or coax) output will bypass the DAC & AMPs on your soundcard in favor of external units, audio effects will still be rendered into the data
Also to note: Vista handles audio differently from XP, mostly in that it tries to standardize more by using OpenAL as the main means of audio 'pipelining'. EAX is based around Directsound 3D which is only emulated in Vista, thus EAX much run through ALchemy and is sort of hacked into Vista. It is a general consensus that EAX doesn't matter in Vista so I would NOT be too worried about paying to get EAX. If you want a good system, worry about the DAC & amps, not EAX.
In sort:
- If you have Vista, get an Asus Xonar card
- If you have XP, get an Auzentech X-Fi card
- Creative Labs cards are sort of pariahs due to Creative's treatment of its customers (intentionally disabled features in Vista on older cards to encourage upgrading, prosecuted a 3rd party driver maker when he made vastly superior drivers). CL cards have pretty good DACs but really shitty amps, there are mods out there to make them better, but Auzentech & Asus do a better job.
Final Words
Before I leave, a quick word on the hot-topic of the forums: Logitech's Z-5500 5.1 speaker system. If you've read through the rest of this post, then these bullets will make sense:
- The Z-5500 has cheap speakers, they all only have a single 3" driver which handle all frequencies from 150 Hz to 20 kHz. Asking that one driver to do the highs, mids, and lows is not a good idea. It can be done but it is a budget solution
- The Z-5500 have a DAC, AMP, 5 satellites and a subwoofer, and support most formats. Doing all this for $300 (used to be $230, I got mine for $180) is impressive. This system is one of those 'Jack of all trades, master of none' type deals.
- The Z's sound like, and should be valued at, $200 tops. They are not an elite speaker system, they are a budget computer speaker system, they are made to compete with your generic Dell speakers.
If you want high quality audio on a budget, look at 2.0 / 2.1 setups. They may not have as many watts, but advertising watts is like talking about how badass your VTEC is, it's NOT that important. If you omg_wtf_bqq_have_to_have 5.1 then fine, get them (but ONLY at or under $200), for $250ish on up look at home theater in a box (HTiB) systems, they all feature speakers with separate tweeters & woofers and do everything else the Z's do.
Bose falls into the same category. Bose is famous for being small and for sounding good for something that small, it's like having a girl say "well, for a guy with a 2" cock, you're a good fuck", congrats, you're better than a tootsie roll (but not by much).
Audio cables. There is some truth to those high-priced audio cables being important. That truth is that a good cable has better shielding which means that it will be less susceptible to external noise. A bare copper wire will inherit noise from its atmosphere which will make the signal less clean. Buying better cables should be done in-step with the rest of your system, if your system costs $300, don't spend $50 on cables, spend $10. If you're spending more that 10% the cost of your system on cables, you're a dumbass.
The weakest link before you toss all your money into one of the areas I've mentioned here, consider your weakest link. If you have leet speakers & a leet soundcard but shitty 128 kbs mp3's, your system will sound like shit. If you have FLACs & a top-end Asus Xonar card connected to Z-5500, your music will sound muddied and bland.
In general, I feel that:
$ spend on speakers should be no more than twice $ spent on receiver / soundcard
Feel free to correct me. I'm saying that as a baseline, by the time you're looking at spending thousands of dollars on this, PLEASE tell me you've done enough research that you knew everything in this post already!!!
Thanks for reading! I hope this served as a good primer on audio for all of you.
Contents of this thread::
Main Post
Z-5500 Satellite take-apart
Version 1 of the main post
For those of you new to this thread: Hello! I'm Arkangyl, I'm a Computer Engineer (which means I know Electrical Engineering too) and I've done quite a bit of reading & research into computer audio. This thread is meant to be an introduction into computer audio for all.
For those of you following update: I've tweaked the format to make it more readable, I hope I didn't cut out too much of my original sass & literary prose in process :-P
Part I: Sound & Speaker Basics
A basic primer in how audio works is probably the best place to start this whole thing since without a good basis of understanding it will be hard to explain the higher level concepts. First, we'll do this with bullets:
- Sound is air moving at a given frequency (general range: 0 to 25,000+ Hz).
- You process sound by your brain interperting how your eardrum vibrates.
- Loudspeakers (what we call speakers, same thing) make sound by using magnets to move some material (aluminum, paper, synthetic) which in turn moves the air thus creating a 'sound'
Now to break things down further, there are three basic types of loudspeakers: sub-woofers, woofers / drivers, and tweeters.
Tweeters are responsible for frequencies ranging from [typically] 2 kHz to 20 kHz(good tweeters will hit 24 kHz, the uber ones can break into the 30 kHz range). They are generally 1/4" to 1" in size and come in quite a few different variants, wikipedia (tweeters) covers the different types pretty well. All tweeters have the same general design and goal though: to move very, very quickly to create the 'high' notes typically this is done with a cone (1/4 to 3/4" woofer optimized for high frequencies) or a dome ('dome' of material over the magnet).
Woofers handle the lower frequencies, generally from 55 Hz up to 2 kHz. They overlap in coverage with the subwoofer but their purpose is to create location & display the sound. Typical woofers range from 3 to 5 1/4" in size and are made from modern polymers (rubber-like substances), paper and Kevlar are also somewhat common. These low & mid range frequencies generally require a larger size (5.25" is a good size) to move enough air to push them out.
Subwoofers deal with the low frequencies, generally you'll see 30 - 150 Hz , and are 8-15" in size. Subwoofers are just larger woofers with a lower range, they operate relatively slowly and move a lot of air so you feel the sound. A good subwoofer will recover quickly from its last sound thus allowing each note to be a distinct sound, bad subwoofers can't respond that quickly and will mush notes together and muddy the music.
Here's a good illustration of how a speaker works (re-hosted from Wikipedia's loudspeaker / woofer / subwoofer page, re-posted under GNU Free Documentation License)
Crossovers (lowpass / highpass filters) are also important to understand, when your computer sends out its audio signal, that signal (all cables coming out of the soundcard) have ALL the frequencies on them. Your various speakers, as mentioned, are each focused on a seperate range and will pretty much output crap if you don't specify what range should reach them. That's where a Crossover comes in, they are basic circuits that filter out the unwanted frequencies. There will be a crossover in the speaker between the inputs and woofer & tweeter AND one going into the subwoofer. All speakers have an ideal operational range, crossovers should be designed based around speaker specifications.
The general design is: voltage_in -> resistor -> voltage_out AND capacitor to ground.
The equation is cutoff_frequency = 1 / (2 * pi * R * C)
Crossovers (filters) can be built in combination with amplifiers too in order to boost the 'good' frequencies at the same time as you cut off the 'bad' ones.
The Box, the actual box the speaker is encased in seems to be overlooked by newbies and obsessed over by DIYers. Good speakers and commonly made with 3/4" MDF, glued at every seam (no nails or screws). The goal of a box is to NOT make any noise while the speaker is doing its thing. The box should not vibrate and the airpath (air comes in through a 'baffle' or that hole in your speaker
) should be clear as if the air makes a lot of noise rustling around the box to get to the woofer / tweeter, you can hear it!Soundstage, this is a fancy term referring to what everything sounds like when you're sitting there listening to your speakers. In short, a good 2.0 / 2.1 setup will create a better soundstage than a bad 5.1 setup. This means that 2 speakers will sound more like surround sound than 5 speakers will. There's a lot of fancy science here, but in short it has to do with accurately re-creating the sounds & how they're projected into a room. Much like a good ventriloquist can make it appear that people on the other side of the room are talking, a good 2.0 setup can make it seem like the sound is all around you
Specifications, I think speakers are about the only thing people around here buy without fully understanding the specifications. Most people look at power, inputs, and the stickers, and that's about it, but there is oh so much more to consider!
THD (total harmonic distortion), is a measure of distortion of the harmonic frequencies (harmonics are multiples of the fundamental frequency), these distortions are generally rather low (according to specs, all Swan & Onkyo systems are 1% or lower, Logitech is at 10% though!) and not perceived by the human ear (for most of us, the difference between 1% and .8% isn't worth paying for)
SNR (signal to noise ratio), is signal strength relative to background noise (SNR = 20*[log base 10](V signal / V noise)), the high the SNR the better, however know that 40 dB is VERY good and around 80 dB will be enough for most people as we're talking about very minor levels of distorion (Swan says they're north of 80 dB, Logitech says 93.5 dB, Onkyo says 100 dB)
RMS power, ahh, RMS versus peak power. The short & sweet explanation is that RMS is the power the systems going to be capable of, and peak is a sort of one-time maximum. RMS is what you care about. (Logitech = 505w, Swan M10 = 40w, Onkyo = 700w). Also look at watts per channel rather than just overall system power to compare 5.1 to 2.1 and 2.0.
Part II: The Digital Birth (audio files)
As I'm sure you've discerned from part 1, sound is an analog electrical ciruit. You're comput is a digital beast, and that's how you're music starts the grand process journey from your hard drive to your ears. There are many, many different formats to store your music in. To be honest I'm only familiar with a few, so if I miss any: post about them, share your knowledge too!
mp3 according to the RIAA the mp3 is the bane of the music industry (NO soapboxes about this stuff here though!!!). What's most important to understand is that the mp3 was made to make an audio file as small as possible and is a lossy compression, it was then expanded to also compress music and leave it sounding good :-P. I'm sure we've all seen the different options for compression, you can rip at different bit-rates, different sample rates, and a few other options. First of all, CD's have a sample rate of 44.1 kHz so that's really what you ought be using (sample rate is the # of samples taken per second, think of it as how many datapoints used to make a line in excel). Stereo bit rate is simply how many bits are used per second of music, more bps means better quality, iTunes defines good as 128 kbs and their top setting as 192 kbs. iTunes music is NOW 256 kbs AAC (I'll explain AAC later) which is actually pretty damn good, nice improvement Apple
AAC AAC is what Apple uses, and that's probably where you'll mainly encounter it. AAC is sort of mp3 version 2.0, in general it sounds better as the compression / de-compression techniques are better, however it is still a lossy compression. AAC also allows for DRM.
FLAC is a lossless audio compression, meaning that nothing gets lost on playback from the original. This however, takes up MUCH more space on your hard drive (see chart below), however flac is still a 40-50% reduction from the un-compressed size!
-Lossy and Lossless compressions are exactly what they sound like: lossy means some data is lost (but it's good enough to be considered useful), lossless means the un-compressed version is the same as the original.
for comparison, here are file sizes for a 5 minute song in different formats (mp3's & aac's are bitrate then sample rate)
mp3 128 / 44.1 == 4.7mb
mp3 192 / 44.1 == 6.8mb
mp3 320 / 44.1 == 11.3mb
aac 128 / 44.1 == 5.4mb
aac 256 / 44.1 == ??? (don't have any yet, guessing ~13mb)
flac == 122mb :-D
Dolby Digital Yep, Dolby Digital is an audio format (AC-3) which is a lossy compression supporting up to 6 channels of sound. For in-depth information go here
DTS An alternative to Dolby Digital, it is owned by DTS Inc.
THX, THX is NOT an audio format like DD and DTS, rather it is a 'quality standard' of which there are many levels. THX in a movie theater is very different from THX on home media because in a theater, THX Inc. provides special crossover circuitry so there is something being 'sold', for everything else it's really nothing more than something for the marketing people to throw around. Remember, THX is from George Lucas (sort of) and he gave us Jar-Jar Binks, 'quality' is relative here...
Part III: Going from bits to a wave
Now we're going to connect part 1 (the speaker) to part 2 (the data)! Isn't this just super-exciting? Don't you wish your textbooks would occasionally ask if you were having fun? Weee.
Digital audio becomes analog audio through a cryptically named device: the DAC (digital to analog converter).
The inputs AND outputs of a DAC are low-voltage (remember, computers use really small voltages), we want them to be big voltages so they're nice and loud, for that we use an amplifier (amp) which simply turns .001 volts into 10 volts without changing anything else about the signal (well, sort of...).
The DAC and AMP(s) can make or break a system. You can get them really cheap (integrated sound card) or spend hundreds of dollars for just the DAC. I suggest reading around on Head-Fi and A/V Science (AVS) as both boards have thousands of threads on DACS & AMPs (as do we!).
A good DAC will accurately translate digital into analog, it sounds simple but the circuit to do so gets quite complex.
A good AMP will transparently improve volume (no distortion as you crank it up to 11 :-D).
The science going on here comes in two flavors, the first is power cleanliness. Poor power, that is power which has many ripples and fluxuations in itself will pass those imperfections into the system and you will hear those imperfections as they distort your music. The second piece that you're paying for is for the rest of the system to also be clean.
Acceptable tolerances in an electrical circuit are usually pretty high (relatively), also a perfectly clean circuit is almost impossible to find as there will always be some, very very minor, imperfection. This is where quality of components, most noteable capacitors, op-amps, and dacs come in. The good ones cost money, mostly because they are far more rare. Think a Ferrari engine versus a Toyota engine, both are good, one is legen-wait_for_it-dary.
DAC A DAC does it's thing the same way we record audio to the computer (but in reverse), it will take a certain number of samples and use those as the points on a graph, the resulting line is the analog signal they gets produced. A better DAC can handle more samples and produce a better, more consistent waveform, mostly though you're paying for a DAC that can handle more samples per second. You'll also encounter THD here (total harmonic distortion) which is a percentage representing the amount of distortion in the signal, along with dynamic range which is the delta between the largest and smallest signals the DAC can output at once, measured in dB. A good DAC will have a THD under .005% (really freaking small) and a dynamic range of over 100 dB, meaning it will create both the really loud sound of the singer and the really quiet sound of the background cymbals resonating.
AMP AMPs have the same statistics as DACs as they can distort and limit the sound in the same ways. It's important to remember that any time we alter the electrical signal, we can completely change how the music sounds. Money here buys you cleanliness and the ability to turn it to 11, because 11 is 1 more than 10!
Audio Processor This is that nifty thing in your computer, the X-Fi or Xonar or Realtek 889A. It does a myrid number of things, from EAX to OpenAL to DTS & DD. The general chain of events is audio signal -> audio processor -> digital output -> DAC -> amp -> speaker so a sound card WILL be used somewhat even with digial outputs.
*Using the S/PDIF (optical or coax) output will bypass the DAC & AMPs on your soundcard in favor of external units, audio effects will still be rendered into the data
Also to note: Vista handles audio differently from XP, mostly in that it tries to standardize more by using OpenAL as the main means of audio 'pipelining'. EAX is based around Directsound 3D which is only emulated in Vista, thus EAX much run through ALchemy and is sort of hacked into Vista. It is a general consensus that EAX doesn't matter in Vista so I would NOT be too worried about paying to get EAX. If you want a good system, worry about the DAC & amps, not EAX.
In sort:
- If you have Vista, get an Asus Xonar card
- If you have XP, get an Auzentech X-Fi card
- Creative Labs cards are sort of pariahs due to Creative's treatment of its customers (intentionally disabled features in Vista on older cards to encourage upgrading, prosecuted a 3rd party driver maker when he made vastly superior drivers). CL cards have pretty good DACs but really shitty amps, there are mods out there to make them better, but Auzentech & Asus do a better job.
Final Words
Before I leave, a quick word on the hot-topic of the forums: Logitech's Z-5500 5.1 speaker system. If you've read through the rest of this post, then these bullets will make sense:
- The Z-5500 has cheap speakers, they all only have a single 3" driver which handle all frequencies from 150 Hz to 20 kHz. Asking that one driver to do the highs, mids, and lows is not a good idea. It can be done but it is a budget solution
- The Z-5500 have a DAC, AMP, 5 satellites and a subwoofer, and support most formats. Doing all this for $300 (used to be $230, I got mine for $180) is impressive. This system is one of those 'Jack of all trades, master of none' type deals.
- The Z's sound like, and should be valued at, $200 tops. They are not an elite speaker system, they are a budget computer speaker system, they are made to compete with your generic Dell speakers.
If you want high quality audio on a budget, look at 2.0 / 2.1 setups. They may not have as many watts, but advertising watts is like talking about how badass your VTEC is, it's NOT that important. If you omg_wtf_bqq_have_to_have 5.1 then fine, get them (but ONLY at or under $200), for $250ish on up look at home theater in a box (HTiB) systems, they all feature speakers with separate tweeters & woofers and do everything else the Z's do.
Bose falls into the same category. Bose is famous for being small and for sounding good for something that small, it's like having a girl say "well, for a guy with a 2" cock, you're a good fuck", congrats, you're better than a tootsie roll (but not by much).
Audio cables. There is some truth to those high-priced audio cables being important. That truth is that a good cable has better shielding which means that it will be less susceptible to external noise. A bare copper wire will inherit noise from its atmosphere which will make the signal less clean. Buying better cables should be done in-step with the rest of your system, if your system costs $300, don't spend $50 on cables, spend $10. If you're spending more that 10% the cost of your system on cables, you're a dumbass.
The weakest link before you toss all your money into one of the areas I've mentioned here, consider your weakest link. If you have leet speakers & a leet soundcard but shitty 128 kbs mp3's, your system will sound like shit. If you have FLACs & a top-end Asus Xonar card connected to Z-5500, your music will sound muddied and bland.
In general, I feel that:
$ spend on speakers should be no more than twice $ spent on receiver / soundcard
Feel free to correct me. I'm saying that as a baseline, by the time you're looking at spending thousands of dollars on this, PLEASE tell me you've done enough research that you knew everything in this post already!!!
Thanks for reading! I hope this served as a good primer on audio for all of you.
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Z-5500 Satellite take-apart
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