Soldato
I don’t often come in here but when I do, I cant help but notice a general lack of understanding when it comes to purchasing sound equipment for your PC. This thread is to help you guys out when deciding what to do 
A PC is an electrically “noisy” place and as such, isn’t the best at producing pure HiFi unless you opt for an outboard sound card and/or use a digital output. Having said that, unless you are really into your hifi (which you probably aren’t if you are reading this) that extra bit of noise probably wont bother you too much.
So, you have choices to make:
Do I stick with my onboard sound card?
Almost certainly not! If you can afford to do it, get yourself a decent sound card! From spending just a little more on your sound card, the jump in quality is immense!
What card should I buy?
A good question and one that is certain to be argued over. All I will say on the matter is that if you avoid ANY creative product, you shouldn’t go wrong. Creative are good at marketing and not at all good at making sound cards. Look towards better cards such as M-Audio or E-MU. There are better on the market, but at least they aren’t Creative!
Once you have picked a sound card, you then have the trickier part – the minefield that is the world of speakers. There are an awful lot of threads where people are going out and spending £240 on speakers believing they are good value for money – they are not!
As a surround sound system, they are barely capable of producing a convincing sound stage and for music reproduction they are woefully inadequate! For the same money or less you can purchase a separate hifi system that will beat any PC speakers hands-down. Admittedly, you will find it impossible to get a surround setup for the same money but the gains to be had as far as stereo is concerned are more than enough to make up for that. Indeed, some posters here have done away with surround sound systems costing several thousand pounds to focus on stereo reproduction that rivals that of the old surround system!
What is an amplifier? Why does this make a difference?
An integrated amplifier takes a signal from a sound source such as a PC or CD player and amplifies it to a signal capable of driving a pair of speakers. There are a few different types of amplifiers on the market these days but the ones that are primarily used in HiFi amps are transistor amps varying in power between 30w/channel and 500+w/channel. The two other types of amplifier are valve amps (old technology but sounds different and some people prefer this) and digital amplifiers. Digital amplifiers, for the most part, are absolutely terrible and are what you find in cheaply made things like PC speakers.
Power isn’t everything! A speaker has a sensitivity – this is how much sound it produces for one watt of input power, measured in decibels. Typically, this is between ~85 and 90dB. A “normal” listening level should be kept below 94dB to avoid hearing damage. It takes double the power for an increase of 3dB. From this, you can see that for normal listening you aren’t going to need more than just a few watts from your amplifier before you get to a point where you are going to begin to damage your hearing! Disregard power almost completely when deciding on an amplifier! I cannot stress this enough!
Lots of factors can affect sound quality from an integrated amplifier. “Integrated” means that it contains both parts of the amplifier – the preamp stage and the power amp stage. A preamp basically lets you adjust volume and choose an input whilst the power amp just takes one input (from the preamp) and amplifies that by a fixed amount to drive the speakers. The quality of both of those stages are important and ultimately decide how good the amp is. The components used by more expensive amplifiers often have a better frequency response (and hence sound better).
That’s the basics of a normal stereo amplifier – a surround sound amplifier/receiver is basically the same but with more channels on the power amp stage and a decoder in the preamp stage to take a digital signal and turn that into 6/7/8 signals to be sent to the power amp & subwoofer. If you want a surround sound system, you need one of these types but they do cost a lot more pound for pound – a £600 A/V amp generally sounds about the same as a £200 stereo amp for music!
So, what do I get for £240?
Well, you COULD go and buy a “THX” certified PC speaker system. George Lucas grants the THX certification to anything, it is a meaningless standard that does not require the product to be of a high quality at all.
If you want an easy solution or want surround for that kind of money no matter how poor the quality, the above mentioned speaker packages are for you!
If you wish to purchase something a lot better for the same money, carry on reading! Buying new (a wise choice for a fledgling in the world of Hifi without some “expert” guidance) a trip to somewhere like Richer Sounds throws up a few possibilities, such as getting a Cambridge Audio A1 at £79.99. Whilst to many Hifi enthusiasts, this amp is considered “poor”, compared to the amplification offered by PC speakers, they are an entirely different league.
This leaves you £160 to buy speakers and speaker cable…
At this point, its no longer a case of what is “better” than the other – it is down to what music you listen to and what you like to hear from a speaker. Everyone is an individual and people do have preferences but I would nominate these three:
Mission M70S - £79.95
Mourdant Short 902 - £99.95
TDL KV1 - £99.95
Then throw in some Gale XL cable, £1 a metre and you are away, saving yourself up to about £70 in the process too! You might want to invest in some stands for the speakers to put them on, but if you don’t have space for that simply blu-tacking them to your desk should be sufficient!
If your PC is the centre of your lifestyle at home, the chances are that you will benefit massively from this upgrade!
Another point that I just want to make quickly before the end:
Turn off ALL equalisation settings!
Turn them off and leave them off – I would suggest you totally forgot they were there. If you must, turn them back on after a week of not using them and I am fairly certain that you will leave them off for good.
ALL of the best kit comes totally devoid of any sort of equalisation/tone control because its not “the music” as it was intended, you are tampering with it and it generally sounds rubbish for it too.
A PC is an electrically “noisy” place and as such, isn’t the best at producing pure HiFi unless you opt for an outboard sound card and/or use a digital output. Having said that, unless you are really into your hifi (which you probably aren’t if you are reading this) that extra bit of noise probably wont bother you too much.
So, you have choices to make:
Do I stick with my onboard sound card?
Almost certainly not! If you can afford to do it, get yourself a decent sound card! From spending just a little more on your sound card, the jump in quality is immense!
What card should I buy?
A good question and one that is certain to be argued over. All I will say on the matter is that if you avoid ANY creative product, you shouldn’t go wrong. Creative are good at marketing and not at all good at making sound cards. Look towards better cards such as M-Audio or E-MU. There are better on the market, but at least they aren’t Creative!
Once you have picked a sound card, you then have the trickier part – the minefield that is the world of speakers. There are an awful lot of threads where people are going out and spending £240 on speakers believing they are good value for money – they are not!
As a surround sound system, they are barely capable of producing a convincing sound stage and for music reproduction they are woefully inadequate! For the same money or less you can purchase a separate hifi system that will beat any PC speakers hands-down. Admittedly, you will find it impossible to get a surround setup for the same money but the gains to be had as far as stereo is concerned are more than enough to make up for that. Indeed, some posters here have done away with surround sound systems costing several thousand pounds to focus on stereo reproduction that rivals that of the old surround system!
What is an amplifier? Why does this make a difference?
An integrated amplifier takes a signal from a sound source such as a PC or CD player and amplifies it to a signal capable of driving a pair of speakers. There are a few different types of amplifiers on the market these days but the ones that are primarily used in HiFi amps are transistor amps varying in power between 30w/channel and 500+w/channel. The two other types of amplifier are valve amps (old technology but sounds different and some people prefer this) and digital amplifiers. Digital amplifiers, for the most part, are absolutely terrible and are what you find in cheaply made things like PC speakers.
Power isn’t everything! A speaker has a sensitivity – this is how much sound it produces for one watt of input power, measured in decibels. Typically, this is between ~85 and 90dB. A “normal” listening level should be kept below 94dB to avoid hearing damage. It takes double the power for an increase of 3dB. From this, you can see that for normal listening you aren’t going to need more than just a few watts from your amplifier before you get to a point where you are going to begin to damage your hearing! Disregard power almost completely when deciding on an amplifier! I cannot stress this enough!
Lots of factors can affect sound quality from an integrated amplifier. “Integrated” means that it contains both parts of the amplifier – the preamp stage and the power amp stage. A preamp basically lets you adjust volume and choose an input whilst the power amp just takes one input (from the preamp) and amplifies that by a fixed amount to drive the speakers. The quality of both of those stages are important and ultimately decide how good the amp is. The components used by more expensive amplifiers often have a better frequency response (and hence sound better).
That’s the basics of a normal stereo amplifier – a surround sound amplifier/receiver is basically the same but with more channels on the power amp stage and a decoder in the preamp stage to take a digital signal and turn that into 6/7/8 signals to be sent to the power amp & subwoofer. If you want a surround sound system, you need one of these types but they do cost a lot more pound for pound – a £600 A/V amp generally sounds about the same as a £200 stereo amp for music!
So, what do I get for £240?
Well, you COULD go and buy a “THX” certified PC speaker system. George Lucas grants the THX certification to anything, it is a meaningless standard that does not require the product to be of a high quality at all.
If you want an easy solution or want surround for that kind of money no matter how poor the quality, the above mentioned speaker packages are for you!
If you wish to purchase something a lot better for the same money, carry on reading! Buying new (a wise choice for a fledgling in the world of Hifi without some “expert” guidance) a trip to somewhere like Richer Sounds throws up a few possibilities, such as getting a Cambridge Audio A1 at £79.99. Whilst to many Hifi enthusiasts, this amp is considered “poor”, compared to the amplification offered by PC speakers, they are an entirely different league.
This leaves you £160 to buy speakers and speaker cable…
At this point, its no longer a case of what is “better” than the other – it is down to what music you listen to and what you like to hear from a speaker. Everyone is an individual and people do have preferences but I would nominate these three:
Mission M70S - £79.95
Mourdant Short 902 - £99.95
TDL KV1 - £99.95
Then throw in some Gale XL cable, £1 a metre and you are away, saving yourself up to about £70 in the process too! You might want to invest in some stands for the speakers to put them on, but if you don’t have space for that simply blu-tacking them to your desk should be sufficient!
If your PC is the centre of your lifestyle at home, the chances are that you will benefit massively from this upgrade!
Another point that I just want to make quickly before the end:
Turn off ALL equalisation settings!
Turn them off and leave them off – I would suggest you totally forgot they were there. If you must, turn them back on after a week of not using them and I am fairly certain that you will leave them off for good.
ALL of the best kit comes totally devoid of any sort of equalisation/tone control because its not “the music” as it was intended, you are tampering with it and it generally sounds rubbish for it too.
