Audigy who?
Written: Aug 23 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Great sound quality,INEXPENSIVE, no flashy bloat-ware like Creative: just good PC audio.
Cons: Where's the true 5.1? Questionable product support
The Bottom Line: Outstanding quality + Great price = TEH WINNAR!!!1
|
|
|
| cmudude's Full Review: Philips Seismic Edge Sound Card |
I build and tweak PCs as a hobby in addition to having sold audio equipment back in High School, and I must say I'm impressed with this card.
Out-of-box, this soundcard comes with the necessary guides and hardware to get a novice computer user safely through the installation process. As a previous reviewer suggested,there is one caveat though: Philips presents the card as being 5.1 channel capable which would lead one to believe that the card is capable of decoding dolby digital signal, but in fact, it cannot. 5.1 channels are extrapolated from a pro-logic or stereo signal and not a digital signal. This should be stated in the Philips documention, as it leads one to believe that it is possible to hook up a 2 pronged digital signal cable from the DVD drive to the soundcard and get DD decoding. This is simply not the case, though. There is not a 2 pronged digital input on the card, since this version does not decode digital 5.1 signals anyway, so a digital input is useless in this case. Since the card does extrapolate 5.1 channels from 2 channel digital audio, there are of course 5.1 outputs on the rear of the card; but I haven't tested this configuration, though, and don't really care, as pseudo 5.1 output is inferior sounding to a good set of stereo speakers.
Once I got the card installed, some hardware issues popped up; but these cannot be attributed to a flaw in the soundcard but rather with older drivers and certain motherboard chipsets.
The first problem I encountered involved some instability problems encountered with the out-of-box drivers. This can be solved simply by downloading the latest drivers for this card from the Philips site. Secondly, on motherboards with the via686b southbridge controller and possilbly other Via based chipsets, one should make sure that the proper 4-in-1 drivers are installed: older or inappropriate versions of these drivers may cause some stuttering of audio during graphically intensive applications such as winamp visualizer plug-ins or mpeg video playback. This glitch is due to IRQ resource sharing: it becomes a big party of PCI cards on IRQ11 with Windows 2000. Even so, this is a very minor glitch. It does not make the system unstable, and only occurs when resizing or moving these graphically intensive application windows around your desktop. With the patches installed, stuttering is practically non-existant.
From inside Windows, the properties of the card can be controlled easily via a comprehensive yet simple control panel that can be accessed from the system tray.
**Sound quality wise the Philips card hangs very closely with the SB Audgy series tested on my Advent multimedia speakers, which are good enough to hear differences in sound quality. The output quality of this soundcard is IMHO more musical with warmer tonality and a more natural soundstage than that of the Audigy, which is brighter and more analytic.
Although a choice based on these descriptions may come down to a matter of individual preference, the forgiving qualities of the Philips card allow more recordings to sound better, which is optimal in a computer oriented listening situation where 128-192 kbps mp3s are the norm. These qualities also cut down on fatigue during extended listening sessions. Additionally, the Philips card seems to have cleaner internal circuitry as it picks up much less interference than my Audigy card. I haven't compared the signal to noise ratios of Audigy and the PSC-705 but I'd bet money that Philips card is owning the Audigy in this department.
This is a killer piece of hardware, and the fact that I was able to get it at such a good price makes it even better. Great for any system!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 20.00
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
cmudude
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.