W-Hardware W-Hardware W-Hardware, place for all computer hardware reviews, hardware comparisons, hardware prices, news, tests and ratings. Articles
Trust - HS-6200 review
2008-02-20 22:29:00 Not a bad little headset this. Trust 's latest mixes in headphones, a microphone and a 5.1-channel surround sound effect direct to your ears. And it manages to do it all really rather well. That said, we've never really been fully convinced by 5.1 headphones, finding them strong at creating some form of surround sound direct to your ears, yet never coming close to matching the genuine effect of a proper, standalone set of 5.1 speakers. These Trust headphones don't either, although once again you'd be hard pushed to argue with the surround effect they do manage to generate. Our ears were treated to lively audio with a useful bass, certainly in excess of what we were initially expecting. They're not too bad to wear either, and bearing in mind that the photo makes them look quite cumbersome, we found them surprisingly comfortable. We wouldn't be too happy wearing them for hours on end, but they do the job for the odd gaming session, and we just about managed to get to the end of a... More About: Review
Terratec - Aureon 7.1 PCI review
2008-02-19 20:07:00 7.1-channel sound cards are not exactly thick on the ground, particularly those costing under £30, so plenty of games and home cinema enthusiasts may be considering this Terratec Aureon 7.1 PCI sound card for their systems. It has a column of eight sockets down its back panel, providing microphone and line inputs, four analogue speaker outputs and a pair of S/PDIF optical digital sockets for digital input and output. You can switch the microphone input to a headphone output, which is handy, but only by swapping jumpers on the board, not under software control. Terratec, never one for useful printed documentation, excels itself here with just three pages of set-up information. They include a diagram of the card, where the sockets are numbered 1 to 11 and the captions explaining their functions are numbered 12 to 22 (or 23 to 33 in French, 34 to 44 in Italian, etc.). One or two clarifications are necessary on exactly what you can get out of this card. You can get 7.1-channel sound, w... More About: Review
Logitech - Z5450 review
2008-02-19 20:05:00 For Logitech 's noisemakers come closer than any before, save for Saitek's more limited A-250. And while they're not perfect, the Z5450s offer a salivating taste of what's round the corner, combined with a healthy dose of fine audio work that's of quite brilliant quality. So let's backtrack. These 5.1 speakers are 'sort of' wireless. To explain: the front two satellite speakers, the centre speaker and the control box are all connected by - you guessed it - a wire, to the meaty subwoofer. That's the front of the soundstage accounted for. But the control box has an antenna on it, and that means it can wirelessly communicate with the two rear satellites, which no longer need a cable stretching right across your room to connect them up to the subwoofer. Yet there's a catch. While the signal to these satellites is transmitted wirelessly, both still have a wire; in this case, leading to a mains plug. Because to use the Z5450s, you're going to need three mains sockets; two for t... More About: Review
Saitek - A-250 review
2008-02-19 20:03:00 True, wireless headphones are nothing new, but to set up a decent speaker system with no trailing wires has been something the technology industry seems to have been struggling with for years. So it's with a high degree of interest that we greet Saitek 's 2.1 wireless speaker system, the A-250. Now it's admittedly hardly the most elaborate setup, with all the speakers built into one portable unit that looks like a smaller version of an old radio cassette deck. There's also a distinct lack of any kind of balance or equalising tools, save for the trusty old volume control, and that £90 price tag for essentially a 2.1 speaker setup without the flexibility of positional satellites isn't the best news either. You can either have them battery powered or run off the mains, and to get them talking to your PC is simplicity itself. You simply connect the supplied Bluetooth transmitter to a spare USB port, and assuming you're running Windows XP, that's as technical as it gets. The oper... More About: Review
Creative Labs - Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro review
2008-02-19 20:00:00 We've become used to the regular release of new graphics chips but it's a far rarer occurrence when a new audio chip comes to market, and it's no surprise at all that Creative Labs is the company behind the new Sound Blaster X-Fi. This is its first new audio chip since the Audigy 2 in 2002, which was a revision of the original Audigy from 2001. Audigy used 4.6 million transistors so it comes as something of a surprise to learn that Sound Blaster X-Fi is constructed with 51.1 million transistors. The chip is divided into five sections (Sample Rate Converter, Filter, Mixer, Tank and DSP) which are arranged in a configuration that Creative calls an Audio Ring. Creative worked out the details of surround sound audio many years ago so the ten-fold increase in transistors and processing power is all about environmental audio. Audigy supported 64 internal audio channels and four simultaneous real time audio effects; the new X-Fi supports 4,096 channels and eight simultaneous effects. T... More About: Review , Elite
Logitech - Z-5500 Digital review
More articles from this author:2008-02-18 23:59:00 If you've never turned up your speakers while watching the latest Hollywood action blockbuster and felt the thump of an explosion come up through the sofa and reverberate around your ribcage, with the front windows rattling in their single-glazed sockets, you've never lived. Or at least, you've never lived audiophile-style. Naturally, you need a decent home theatre set-up to achieve this and Logitech has a new offering in this department. The Z-5500 Digital home cinema speakers are THX certified and feature a total 500 Watt RMS output, a good chunk of which is the meaty subwoofer (187W) that powers the aforementioned explosions. Dolby Digital, Prologic II and DTS are all supported. There are three 3.5mm mini-jacks provided to hook it up to your analogue sound card (2, 4 and 6 channel cards are supported), plus optical and coaxial digital connections which mean that you can plug the system into your DVD, Xbox or whatever. Unfortunately, there's no standard phono input, so you won... More About: Review 1, 2, 3 |
|
 |
|
 |
