As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
High End Audio from USB
The following report is courtesy of Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak.
Xitel's Pro HiFi Link is just the thing for the musician on the run as well as anyone looking for clean, quiet, audio output and distortion free optical output via TOSlink or digital coaxial cable. The Pro HiFi is a USB 1.1 compliant device housed in a small sleek case and allows any Windows or Mac to output high fidelity stereo, Dolby Digital or DTS audio sources via digital and analog outputs simultaneously. The Pro HiFi has the same great analog stereo output of the HiFi due to its included 20 bit Digital to Analog Converter.
Installation under Windows and Mac systems remains very easy, with no additional drivers needed It Just Works. Plugging the Pro HiFi into your system automatically reroutes any previously existing soundcard's output through itself. Unplug the Pro HiFi and full functionality is returned to any existing soundcard. Sound from analog outputs of the Pro HiFi was just as good as the HiFi previously reviewed, as expected. Using various DVDs I was able to test the Dolby Digital and DTS digital output from the Pro HiFi to my A/V receiver and found it worked exactly as advertised. The Pro HiFi Link will also output any stereo signal via the digital outputs.
The Pro HiFi Link is great for people with extensive digital music collections on their computer who wish to hook up to their home stereo via a distortion free digital hookup. Another great thing about the Pro HiFi Link is it comes with a complete set of cables for all its analog and digital outputs; these cables alone are well worth the price of the product. The Pro HiFi is ideal for laptop users doing presentations as well as music due to the available distortion free digital outputs and high fidelity analog output. Highly recommended.
Klipsch PROMEDIA 5.1 PC Theater
I have a number of computers, and I'm forever changing them around, so I don't often pay much attention to sound systems. If I can hear them it's usually good enough, and I tend to be satisfied with the built in sound from Intel motherboards; which is, in fact, pretty good, or so I thought.
In fact, the sound I've been getting is lousy, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the sound boards. It doesn't matter how good the sound coming out of your computer is, or whether you put more speakers around you to get Surround Sound, if what you're doing is listening to six clock radios. The sound you hear won't be any better than your speakers, and almost all speakers for computer systems are awful.
Then Marty Winston arranged for us to get the Klipsch PROMEDIA 5.1 speaker system, all fifty pounds of it. I connected it up, and for the first time I really could say something meaningful about the sound quality of various computer sound boards vs. the Analog Devices chipset sounds from the Intel mother boards. It's much more like sitting in a theater. The term PC Theater comes to mind.
The delivery guy dropped off a dense package, not quite up to Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) density, but heavy enough that I waited for one of my sons to come over and carry it upstairs.
The box contained the complete Klipsch ProMEDIA 5.1 surround sound speaker system. At one time Klipsch was a very big name in large speaker systems, particularly among audiophiles familiar with McIntosh and DynaKit, but not a name much heard from in the last decade or so. Unpacking the box revealed why it was so dense: In addition to the 18" cube subwoofer/amplifier, there were also five smaller speakers. This looked like a quite complete audio system.
Incidentally, that's the "5.1" so beloved by audio gear ad headline writers: five regular speakers, for surround sound, and one shared bass channel. (Bass isn't very directional, at least indoors.) I'll use "regular" as shorthand for "Mid range through treble," though you'll also see "full range" to mean the same thing.
Each of the regular speakers is about 8" tall, 3" wide and thick, and they feel pretty weighty; they won't fall off your desk at the slightest pull on the cable, like so many cheap PC speakers. The weight appears to be a combination of speakers with good magnets and decent magnetic shielding, because they never visibly interfered with the monitor.
In addition to the six speakers and hookup cable, the system also comes with a control head, about the same size as the regular speakers, with electronic volume controls and an IR receiver for the included remote. The speakers hook up with included speaker wire; this is hardly 8 gauge Monster Cable, but plenty fine for the application. There's also an audio processing and I/O box, which I'll talk about later.
We hooked the Klipsch's audio in jacks (on the bass unit/amplifier) up to Darth, a 3 GHz Intel Pentium/4 running Windows XP Professional, using three 1/8" stereo cables. Darth has a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, which supports everything from 2 channel stereo up to 5.1. The Santa Cruz card has four 1/8" jacks, one a "VersaPlug," which can be reconfigured to be analog audio out, analog in, or digital audio out. This neatly solves the problem of fitting enough plugs on a PCI slot cover, without needing special cables.
Unfortunately, while the Santa Cruz VersaPlug can support digital out, it won't digitally support 5.1 digital out, only 4 channel surround. The Philips Acoustic Edge sound card they sent with the Klipsch speakers does have a digital out port (and a host of special adapter cables), and from limited experience I'd say it sounds great, but we couldn't get its drivers to reliably install on Darth. We suspect the Philips card would work fine if you had never installed any other audio drivers on a PC, but that test will have to wait until next month. We'll be consulting with the Philips people on this, because it really looks like a good card.
From what I've read, this three cable analog audio hookup is pretty standard in the PC Theater industry: one stereo pair for the front left and right speakers; one for the left/right surround (the rear speakers), and one for the center plus the subwoofer. Otherwise you'd have to split the channels with custom crossover cables. It means your audio is being decoded in the PC, where it's subject to all manner of electrical interference.
Once all your audio is hooked up, Windows doesn't automatically know what's out there; you have to tell it. Under XP, you tell Windows this using the Sound control panel, Audio tab, Advanced button. There, you select whether you have stereo built in speakers (say, a laptop), 2 channel stereo outboard, 4 channel surround audio, 5.1, or 7.1 and there are other choices. At least on Darth, Windows XP doesn't always remember the choice you've made; it reverts to 2 channel stereo audio when you're not looking.
Microsoft is talking about solving several of these problems in "Longhorn," the next version of Windows, by including more intelligence. With luck, there will be a plug and play audio setup wizard along the same lines as the Media Center PC video display setup wizard. This wizard (which we saw at April's WinHEC; see last month's column) does a pretty good job of setting the chroma (color) levels, gamma, and other important parameters, for a plasma display, CRT or LCD. Anyone who's ever wondered why all the TVs in a store display are showing completely different colors knows just how much variation there can be in analog video displays. The Media Center PC setup wizard is a good first step toward consumer color accuracy, but there's a long way to go. Media Center PC is supposed to further blur the lines between living room TV watching and computer room game playing, with machines that are quieter and more friendly, a battle which Microsoft has been fighting for the last decade.
An audio setup wizard might, for instance, quiz you on what speakers you have hooked up. Sound card companies looking for my vote should include such a feature now. It ought to let you select and test one speaker at a time, to ensure you have everything hooked up right. (The Philips card has this, but the Turtle Beach doesn't. Alas, the driver installation problem caused the Philips to blow up when we tried to use this feature.)
Unfortunately, until there's a smart way for the PC to query the amplifier and speakers, audio system setup will involve human intervention.
One solution to this would be connecting everything by, say, USB 2.0. That way, the computer could query the amplifier, the speakers, and any outboard processing (such as DTS decoding), and draw you a picture of what it had found. I am told that something like this is coming, with sound synthesis and mixing done outside the computer, and I'm supposed to have one of these Real Soon Now. More when I know more.
We tested the system's performance several ways: regular Windows audio, an online game, watching Windows Media downloads, and DVD playback. Windows alerts, etc. certainly are more impressive when they come at you from all sides. Most games we tried only support stereo output, so you can't tell if an attacker is in front or behind you. Windows Media and DVD playback deserve a little more discussion.
One of the more impressive Windows Media 9 demos is the trailer for the Brown Family's movie Step Into Liquid. (Bruce Brown made the independent surfing film Endless Summer an age back; his kids are still at it.) That's not a test I would have performed last month: The 120 Mbyte 3 minute hi definition trailer downloaded in about 10 minutes, thanks to my new cable modem. With the Hawking FR24 dual WAN router, I was able to download Windows Updates without delay: The bigger cable modem circuit was taken up by the 120 Mbyte file transfer, so the iDSL was used for the smaller update. I love it, when it's working right.
The Step Into Liquid trailer is impressive for several reasons: It shows how well Windows Media 9 (WM9) can encode material, how (relatively speaking) compressed the material can be and still look great, and how you really, truly, can view high definition video on a PC and completely forget everything but the story being told. None of those things were true, even a year ago, on PCs, not at resolutions greater than standard TV definition.
One home entertainment buzzphrase is "immersive viewing." It's what creative people are always striving for: The filmmaker wants you to forget there's a dark spot in the projected image, rude people talking in the aisle behind you, or that you didn't get butter on your popcorn. When I'm writing fiction, I want the reader to forget that the book was set in 10 point Garamond, that the printer didn't sand the edges smooth, or that it took me an extra three months to write a proper ending. In all cases, the goal is to suck you into the story.
One of the biggest killers for the immersive illusion is playback glitches, skipped frames; Windows Media 9 and fast computers have, for the most part, solved this. Thanks to the continuing revolutions of CPU speed, better graphics chips, and smarter programming, we can fall into a 3 minute trailer and just watch people crazy enough to ride waves so big they have to be towed into them. You can find the Step Into Liquid hi def trailer on the Windows Media site, and it's one decent test of the video playback on your latest generation system.
Speaking of WM9, Microsoft and Island Interactive gave me a copy of a special edition version of Standing in the Shadows of Motown at WinHEC. The second disc of this set is WM9 encoded as 720p (720 lines resolution, non interlaced or "progressive"), designed for playback on a suitably equipped PC, like Darth. The video playback on this disc was good, but Alex noted that we seemed to have a lipsync problem: What people were saying didn't match up with when they were saying it. Audio was lagging video by a few frames. Also, we weren't getting any center channel audio at all.
And that only got more pronounced when I discovered an obscure button on the Turtle Beach control panel. The "Synthesize 5.1" button changes from light red on chrome to slightly brighter red on chrome when engaged, so it took me a while to find it. Once on, we got center speaker output and better bass output. But, because of the added processing burden, lipsync got even worse. One of my favorite test discs, John Frankenheimer's Ronin, showed Robert DeNiro talking a good third of a second before the sound. It's no fun to have the ka BOOM! of an explosion well after the car blows up. More seriously, this is another of those immersion killers: The mind is very conscious of the "wrongness" of bad audio sync, even if you don't know what's up.
Pournelle's First Law of Computing says "One person, at least one CPU." A good corollary might be "Use the right processor for the job." Any decent DVD player costing $100 or more comes with an SPDIF digital audio output, in addition to 6 discrete channels of analog audio out. That's using dedicated DSPs (Digital Signal Processors). DSPs don't have the audio computing lag of a general purpose CPU, even a fast one like a Pentium/4 or an AMD Athlon. The Klipsch's audio input/processing box, the one we haven't tried yet, has an SPDIF input. Such a connection should bring the audio lag down to nothing.
Purists and audiophiles are probably muttering under their breath about how that Pournelle has completely skipped over DTS vs. Dolby Digital encoding, PC based vs. amplifier based matrix decoding, synthesized vs. "real" 5.1. They'd be right, and that's a subject for another month. For now, I can recommend the Klipsch Promedia 5.1 speaker/amplifier combo as good enough that once you've heard them, you'll start looking for a better sound board.
Recommended.