The ultimate sound system for your game computer

Sound in computer games is all about realism.
Computer sound systems has developed from a simple single speaker in the old XT's that literally was used as a warning device to the user when he made an error to a basic 2 speaker system that was mostly used just to listen to normal sounds to a point where we can now simulate the best theatre systems on our computers.

The realism available in computer sound has improved so much over the last 10 years that it is virtually unthinkable that a computer these days could be working without at lease a 2 speaker system with 3D sound imitation. Many a motherboard comes with up to 6 channels of sound on board.

What to look for in a sound system for your gaming computer?
- First of all you want something with surround sound - my suggestion will be at least 6 channels also called 5.1 where one channel is used for the sub-woover producing the base sounds and the rest are literally utilized in a similar fashion to the standard surround sound home theatre system.
- Secondly you would want a unit with the highest sample rate possible - as the developments are really happenning on a daily basis check the specs and ask the guys what is the sample rate something in the order of 128k or better is awesome quality at the time of writing this. Some cards go up to 256k but it is probably out of the average guys budget?
- Thirdly check the interfacing of the card - ASIO is an industry standard and it defines the ability of a card to interact with software without additional drivers. The latest standard in this regard is ASIO 2.0. In other words if your Sound card is ASIO 2.0 compliant you will probably not need any other software or drivers to use it with any software that has the same compliancy. Sometimes you will find a fascinating system but it will only work with its own software and that limits the usefullness of such a system. It restricts you and that is one thing I hate and I believe most others feel the same.

Speakers- selecting the system for your experience.
Once you have the sound card sorted out - it is now time to start looking at the speakers - it is often easy to purchase a set of speakers for your system - A 5.1 system ready boxed and it is often very good systems. My suggestion will be to use powered speakers as the average sound card only sets out very limited power and the computer sound system's performance like the performance of most of our equipment in life depends on the excess or surplus power available to the speaker. It is not a good idea to drive a speaker to it's maximum capacity for normal use - the reason for this being that when you get those peak sounds it will be overdriven with the distortion of the sound and poor quality. In other words get speakers that can handle 200 watts if you want to normally drive them at 100 watts - this will mean that you can hardly ever overdrive them and the sound quality will nearly always be superb.

Again I want to stress my point once you have the computer get the best sound system you can afford if you want to have the best experience possible in your computer game.

JD
Pretoria
21 January 2006