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What's Up With Computer Audio?
Mr.Tweak writes "Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. We'll present some benchmark numbers of five different sound solutions as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done to improve things using nVidia's SoundStorm APU as an example."
All you need is an FM-synth card and the midi that was used in the original DOOM to get your adrenaline going while gaming!
No game since has ever matched DOOM/DOOM2's music effect upon the player, in my opinion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Maybe for most people it's nice to have one component that just works as advertised, and doesn't necessarily need to be replaced with an expensive upgrade every 2 years. Not to cast aspersions on the geek's need to endlessly tinker, but don't we have our hands full already with graphic cards, processors, memory, etc.?
If you think about it what has Creative done to anyone who has made a decent card in the past few years? they either sued them to the brink of death (Aureal), or acquired all the technologies that other developers used (sensaura) (sp?)
the only other real alternative was Nvidia which basically is suffering from cheap mainboard manufactures who wont spend the extra 50 cents on a decent DAC. the vast majority of boards with it are nowhere near soundstorm certified, thus its removal from A64 boards. I expect Intel to go the same way with their new chipset coming out too.
Castle Wolfenstein, first version, 2D ascii, on a Commodore 64...
They had a neat trick. To unlock safes, you had to push the volume up of your monitor to the max to hear the "click". But when an SS entered the room and screamed "Achtung" at the max volume the C64 could produce, you would jump 3 feet behind and rush to take back control of your keyboard to take whatever action necessary to get out of this mess.
The C64... ahhhhh... the good old days.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
They had 5.1 headphones
Excellent, finally a product for us people with 5.1 ears!
It is quite ironic (yes, this is irony, not coincidence) that an article that purports to bemoan the neglect of sound in favor of picture proceeds to rate the audio gear based on how it impacts graphics performance.
I can tell from page 2 that the authors are biased towards this AMD solution for some reason.
These guys actually try and claim that a $149 add-on card cannot provide 5.1 (6-channel) sound. Seriously, look at their comparison chart. It's so wacked you'd think it was Microsoft's work.
I mean, seriously, for less than $30 you can get a SB Live! 5.1 that will provide a lot of what's being listed on their page 2 chart. And certainly by the time you've reached their $149 price-point you're able to get yourself a nice SB Audigy2 that can do everything they want but hardware AC3 encoding.
And I have to be honest -- is the hardware AC3 encoding really going to be much of an issue for most people? I don't see audio enthusiasts being geared for onboard audio (no matter what it is capable of), and the value segment rarely goes for some fancy surround sound.
Basically, I'm saying this article is bullocks from the second page on. I know it's easier to critisize than to write a good article... but still, these guys seem to be entirely too biased towards this product to make their 'review' worth my time. Personally, I think it's worth a grain of salt.
Now go ahead and mod me down for being a crotchety old man.
/dev/random