µATX Overview: Prelude to a Roundup

Audio/Visual Department

If we plan on having a large amounts of storage then it would be reasonable to expect us to have the capability to fill up those hard drives. One of the quickest ways to do this is to use your PC as a DVR device. The inability of our local cable company to actually get us a working OCUR (Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver) system meant we had to go old school in our search for reasonably priced digital TV tuner cards with QAM support. We settled on the FusionHDTV 5 Express, ATI TV Wonder 650, and the Hauppauge Win-HVR 1600 for our TV tuner duties. Our roundup will feature images captured with these cards along with a product overview in our HTPC buildup. We will follow up with an in-depth look at each card starting next month as we compare them to the new FusionHDTV6 Cool featuring reduced energy consumption and thermal output. Maybe by then, our cable company will have hopefully figured out the CableCARD setup - or at least quit drilling new holes on our walls.

If you are going capture, view, and play back HD video then it stands to reason that you want your audio solution to be capable of matching the video output. While we could have concentrated on gaming with the Creative lineup of X-Fi products, we decided to take a more logical approach in our comparison to the onboard audio solutions. All of our motherboards feature onboard audio solutions with Realtek being represented almost universally, but we tend to prefer the solutions from Analog Devices and IDT (SigmaTel) under Vista at this time. The onboard solutions in our roundup generally feature 6-channel or 8-channel output with most at least having the option of S/PDIF output via an optical or coaxial port.

Speaking of Vista, Microsoft changed all the rules with the new audio stack and we will spend additional time in a side-bar article going over the changes and looking at the performance of our various audio solutions. We had a surprising number of audio solution choices for our HTPC buildup and this is one area where Creative gets thoroughly thrashed in feature comparisons and capabilities. In the end we decided to concentrate our efforts on three cards that should cover our immediate needs for both our HTPC and Home/Office systems. We selected the ASUS Xonar D2, bgears b-enspire, and the Auzentech HDA X-Plosion 7.1 DTS Connect. We are still waiting on our Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sample and will compare that card against the Creative offerings later this year. Our motherboard roundup will feature scores from our onboard audio solutions and the ASUS Xonar D2 along with a complete features comparison and test results with our various speakers and A/V receiver.

We have always been fans of utilizing our home theater equipment to output our PC audio streams, but for many this type of setup is impractical. While we are not always excited about speaker technology designed exclusively for the PC audience, there are some really good solutions from Creative, Logitech, and Klipsch at the higher end of the market. For our roundup we were interested in using speakers that would properly convey the subtleties of our onboard or audio card outputs while being able to pull double duty with the A/V receiver. We use a Swans M-200 setup in our labs as the standard reference speaker configuration for most testing and have always been impressed with the quality of sound they generate. This also holds true for our 5.1 tests as we utilize the Swans M20-5.1.

Like most video and audio equipment, you typically get what you pay for and speakers are no exception, but there are a few surprises. We are not going to pretend we are experts on speaker technology nor are we capable of providing the type of reviews you can get at one of the dedicated A/V sites, but we will provide our subjective review of the audio equipment that will be utilized in our roundup. To that extent, we asked our good friends at The Audio Insider what they would recommend for our testing. They came back and suggested we purchase the Swans M10 for our base multimedia system and then they highly suggested the new Swans D1080 for our musical tastes while remaining on a budget. We also decided to go for the revised Swans M200MKII to shake up our test beds while utilizing an Acculine A2 setup for our 5.1 testing. We pulled out our trusty Onkyo TX-SR605 to handle the A/V receiver duties when testing the pass-through capabilities of our onboard audio solutions.