[thechat] Four Speaker System

Seb Potter seb at poked.org
Tue May 6 04:33:23 CDT 2003


> Does somebody have "PCI Audio Applications"? There is a 4 speaker Demo in it. On
> running it, an environment of a room with 5 speakers opens. 1 speaker in middle,
> 2 on right and two on left side. Each speaker represents a speaker physically
> attached to the PC. When clicked, the corresponding speaker plays some kind of
> music. The extreme right and extreme left speakers in the Demo do not trigger
> any sound because they don't have any physical correspondent in real world. What
> kind of hardware (sound card etc.) is needed to get a Four Speaker System shown
> in this demo?
> Thank you,

Hi,

The application is a demo for the C-Media PCI audio range. To get the
best out of it, you'll need a 5.1 channel speaker set-up.

There are 2 ways that you can do this. If your soundcard has the
additional output jacks for subwoofer and rear speakers, then yu can run
all of your speakers through the soundcard. If not, then your soundcard
probably has an optical output (SP-DIF) which you can use to connect to
an external surround amplifier, and from there you can connect all of
your speakers. This is the best option (though also the most expensive)
because the sound fidelity will be far higher than using the soundcard's
analogue output.

If you don't have a 5.1 channel speaker setup, then you can try for four
speakers. In this case each pair of speakers is connected to one of the
outputs on your soundcard. Without the centre speaker and the subwoofer
you may find that speech and bass are difficult to differentiate above
other sounds.

There is one further option available with some C-Media driver sets,
which is called "X-Ear 3D". This can be used if you don't have a second
set of speakers, and uses a pair of headphones worn loosely on the ears
as the rear speakers. I can't really recommend this unless you have a
very good pair of open-back headphones, as too much of the signal from
the front speakers is obscured.

- seb



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