Newbie's Multimedia Speaker System Buyer's Guide
Posted: 2002-05-22 by zero |
This category is probably the most complex and demanding of all three. First of all I'm going to generalize and break it down into two sub-categories based on types of music. These are Detailed and Non-detailed. Why am I going to do this? Because regardless of what you may have read, there is no single set of speakers (no matter how neutral) that is optimal for producing all types of music. As an example, some genres require a panoramic soundstage to do them justice and others need one that is more front-row-center. These differences are exactly what I want to explain here.
Non-detailed
There are genres of music that don't have a whole heck of a lot of detail and subtlety to them but need a lot of what I choose to call "pound effect". This means the sound will be very "in-yer-face" and generally have a lot of bass. Soundstage (the ability to place instruments in a piece of music so that you can tell that the guy off to your left in the second row of the orchestra is playing the triangle) isn't a big requirement and neither is being able to hear the softness of that triangle at the same time as the considerably louder French Horn. The types of music that generally fall into this category are Dance / Rap, Metal, Alternative and Pop, the latter especially because of its often compressed frequency range. They have requirements that are quite similar to those of gaming:
These types of music are going to have a completely different requirement than?
Detailed
The genres that fall into this category place completely different demands on a speaker system. Being able to place the location of instruments in the sound field is much more important ("I want to hear that the guy playing the triangle is off to the left of me in front of the guy playing the vibraphone"). So is the ability to bring out subtle details of the timbre and decay of instruments ("I want to hear that piano note resonate just right") and wide dynamic range ("I want to hear that triangle and at the same time hear the nasal notes of the sax without the two getting all jumbled up"). Can today's multimedia speakers do this? Some of them indeed can - I'm listening to a set right now. Some trade-offs may get made and in my case I sacrificed truly deep bass response for soaring highs and a detailed midrange at the price point I chose to buy at. Jazz, Classical, Blues and R&B are good examples of this type of music and these are their requirements:
Where it gets complicated is if you listen to music from BOTH categories since it's pretty difficult to find such a system given the inherent compromises in the multimedia speaker market. That's where the twists and turns of what makes this interesting comes in.
DVD
As if that didn't complicate matters enough, enter DVD. This is a relatively recent development in the PC world (when compared to games which have been around since Day One of the PC) and despite what some will tell you, you really do need at least a 4.1 system to take full advantage of it. All of today's high performance consumer grade soundcards (post Creative Labs Live!) have the capability to output quality audio and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for DVDs. While this capability is for all intents and purposes not built in (a couple cards have it built in but not activated due to licensing issues - read: Dolby Labs wants a hefty fee for the pleasure), this kind of output can be achieved with third party software such as PowerDVD XP or WinDVD. Of particular note is the fact that one does NOT need an external AC3 decoder to get Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for DVDs, nor do you need a digital set of speakers. I have an analog 5.1 multimedia system and a 6-speaker soundcard and it plays back a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal just fine, LFEs and all.
