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Hello everyone,
Maybe this is a bit off topic but I think it will be of interest to many of you.
I have two Pentium 400 PCs. The one I use for Video work is a celery I built myself.
The other one is a PII 400 Dell. This PC has no sound card (I took it out and put it in the celery 400 system) and yet it has the most awesome sound I have ever heard from any PC.
How was this acheived?
I bought a set of Microsoft DSS80 speakers. These speakers connect to the PC with a supplied USB cable. Inside the DSS80 sub-woofer (which is truly excellent) there is what amounts to very clean sound card electronics. When you play an Audio CD, the digital audio is sent to the speakers over USB and the D/A conversion is done there. The resulting sound quality is superb. There is *NO* noise or garbage from the PCs electronics whatsoever. WAV files and MIDI files are handled similarly. You cannot beleive the clean sound pressure levels these speakers can generate.
The speakers come with an application interface (which repliaces the yellow speaker on the task bar) with a graphic equalizer and you can save and restore settings in named profiles. The interface also has volume, eq bypass, sub-woofer volume and pseudo surrond effects.
The DSS80's are controlled via USB very nicely and fully integrated into the Win98 environment.
The only sound information that cannot be transmitted over USB is DVD audio. But, the speakers also have a mini analog stereo jack. I simply plug the stereo line output from my Creative Dxr2 decoder card into the DSS80 speaker jack, and once again, I get the cleanest possible sound for the application since the PC electronics are bypassed.
What makes me so happy about this setup is my CPU has one less card in it, the sound is phenominal and the price was dirt cheap. I got them from Costco for $109. I got $50 bucks back from Microsoft. Can you get a sound card for $60 bucks that will deliver nearly as clean sound? No. Besides, these things have a powerfull amplifier and excellent fidelity. The sub-woofer delivers tight, musical sound, not the thumping so common in other products. I have since bought another set of these speakers.
The only thing this setup doesn't support is recording. I don't have a 1394 card -- maybe this configuration would work well in a pure DV editing system since the audio is captured via 1394?
-Anthony
Maybe this is a bit off topic but I think it will be of interest to many of you.
I have two Pentium 400 PCs. The one I use for Video work is a celery I built myself.
The other one is a PII 400 Dell. This PC has no sound card (I took it out and put it in the celery 400 system) and yet it has the most awesome sound I have ever heard from any PC.
How was this acheived?
I bought a set of Microsoft DSS80 speakers. These speakers connect to the PC with a supplied USB cable. Inside the DSS80 sub-woofer (which is truly excellent) there is what amounts to very clean sound card electronics. When you play an Audio CD, the digital audio is sent to the speakers over USB and the D/A conversion is done there. The resulting sound quality is superb. There is *NO* noise or garbage from the PCs electronics whatsoever. WAV files and MIDI files are handled similarly. You cannot beleive the clean sound pressure levels these speakers can generate.
The speakers come with an application interface (which repliaces the yellow speaker on the task bar) with a graphic equalizer and you can save and restore settings in named profiles. The interface also has volume, eq bypass, sub-woofer volume and pseudo surrond effects.
The DSS80's are controlled via USB very nicely and fully integrated into the Win98 environment.
The only sound information that cannot be transmitted over USB is DVD audio. But, the speakers also have a mini analog stereo jack. I simply plug the stereo line output from my Creative Dxr2 decoder card into the DSS80 speaker jack, and once again, I get the cleanest possible sound for the application since the PC electronics are bypassed.
What makes me so happy about this setup is my CPU has one less card in it, the sound is phenominal and the price was dirt cheap. I got them from Costco for $109. I got $50 bucks back from Microsoft. Can you get a sound card for $60 bucks that will deliver nearly as clean sound? No. Besides, these things have a powerfull amplifier and excellent fidelity. The sub-woofer delivers tight, musical sound, not the thumping so common in other products. I have since bought another set of these speakers.
The only thing this setup doesn't support is recording. I don't have a 1394 card -- maybe this configuration would work well in a pure DV editing system since the audio is captured via 1394?
-Anthony
. I can watch a DVD, download files & do software development smoothly all at the same time.
But that doesn't bother me because I use another PC for recording. The speakers work fine in a system with a sound card too (best to not connect USB in that case).
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