Computer provides hours of entertainment to its user. Good sound quality of computer will definitely add value to this entertainment. Here are some tips on enhancing the sound quality of your computer.

Ever imagined computer system without speaker? I know it’s too hard to even think of it. Whether you are gaming or watching video files, sound is must to have in a PC. It offers enjoyable experiencewhile you are surfing videos or listening to audio files. Most of the users want to have perfect sound system in their computer. Gamers are looking for ways to enhance the sound quality of their PC. For those who uses computer as media centre, want great depth and quality of sound.

First thing that one should do in order to improve the sound quality is position the speakers in right direction. Speakers should be kept as far as possible from each other and in opposite direction. This will help the speaker to give better depth of sound. Adjustment should be done in such a way that the distance of the speakers from your ear is same. If you are using a separate amplifier and speaker, then it’s important to check the polarity of the cable while connecting it to the amplifier. Perfect match will enhance the frequency response of the sound. If the speakers are delivering low or no bass, it means that the connections are not done properly. Always go for good quality sound card as it can make your system sounds good. So if you are using an old sound card, upgrade it to newer version and feel the difference in audio quality. Buying a new sound card will not cost you much, so go for good brands for better experience.

Most of us don’t know about installing third party software on our computer system. Third party software like win amp helps in having better control over the audio quality.

Third party software will help you in controlling the audio quality via graphics equalizer and filters. You can tune in the sound the way you want. Most of us like bass while other love to have techno beats in it. In short, you can play any audio the way you want. One improvement that you can do in order to improve the sound is buying a good pair of speakers.

Having a good quality speaker matters a lot if you are looking for better audio quality. Try to go for Dolby digital speakers as they are not just any normal speaker but have much better and crisp sound quality.

If you want to avoid access of wiring while placing the speakers at distance, you can go for wireless speakers too. Very first advantage of using this speaker is that it gives you freedom to place the speaker wherever you want without bothering about wires.

Computer with poor audio quality is of no use to many of us, we can’t deny this fact. Many of us like to work while listening to songs over computer. Anyone can enhance the sound of PC by following some simple steps.

You all must have heard about Sound Card in real life, so let’s discuss it in detail. Basically sound card is computer card that mainly deals with the input and output of audio signals of your computer program. The main functionality of sound card is to deliver musical or audio components from multimedia applications like games, media players, videos, presentations etc. You can find sound card that has got a lot of input and output connections in order to perform better sound while listening music and playing games. Most of the sound cards have got a line of connectors, using which it can grab audio signals from various audio devices, then sound card gets that signal and stores them in physical hard disk of computer system for further process.

In today’s computer system you may find sound card in-built but in some of the computers still its users have to use an external sound card in order to provide audio capabilities of the computer system. Seeing today’s world of technology, almost every computer system needs one sound card as without sound card, your PC would look like dead system. Believe it or not but sound or audio gives a new life to a computer system.

What does sound card do?

Conversion of data signal into audio signal can be done by sound card in two easy ways. These two steps are wave table synthesis and FM synthesis. Long ago when the sound card was not invented, the only sound that computer system could use was only of a beep means that the computer system was able to produce sound of beep of some frequency. Usually sound of beep was treated as a warning or signal. Later on with the advancement in technology, developers started making various kind of music for games, videos, movie etc.

It was during 1980’s that computer system with sound capabilities came into existence and this new feature increased its consumer rate very fast. Today you may find n number of manufacturers producing sound cards that is basically built to control sound which is produced by your computer system. Using this sound card, now computer can do more things other than just beep. Sound card can produce 3D sound for games and surround sound for movies and videos. These sound cards can store sound from an external source and can play them later on.

Apart from basic components require producing sound, sound card also need some hardware connections. Digital signal processor is among such hardware components that take some load from CPU so that it can perform calculation during analog and digital conversion. This hardware component can also process multiple channels and sounds. If any computer system does not have its own digital signal processor, it takes help of CPU to keeping doing the task. Sound card has got its own memory that it uses in fast processing of data so now you might have got to know about the importance of sound card. You can find sound card with every single computer and laptop these days but it is important to know and check its manufacturer name as good quality sound card matters a lot for music lovers.

We use computers on a daily basis, at home, at work or while traveling to access the Internet, play computer games, watch movies and so much more. Yet, most of the times if not ever, we never give a second thought to just what our computer is made off. You know it contains hardware components but what exactly they are, how are they called or what is their function within our personal computer are usually questions without answers or with vague ones. I'm going to be talking bellow above about the hardware components for a personal computer that are essential to it:

1. The PC Monitor is the device on which you visualize movies, games, and programs like word editors and Internet browsers. Older models featured a Cathode Ray Tube (hence the name CRT) with controls housed in a plastic case. Their diagonal ranged from 13 to 21 inches. Today LCD monitors have flooded the market, providing wide screen image display and smaller weight compared to their older counterparts, the CRT computer monitors. Most monitors feature controls used to adjust contrast and brightness while others have options to move the image left, right, up or down. CRT monitors also have a degauss option which can be used when the image isn't displayed correctly.

When it comes to picture quality we basically speak of resolution and refresh rate. Resolution is measured in pixels and is connected with how well our monitor displays images. Refresh rate refers to how often your image quality gets refresh. The recommended quality is usually 60 Hz, but since there are so many types of monitors it is best to consult the monitor's manual for the right value. Bear in mind that using a different value other the one recommended in your manual can damage your monitor.

2. The motherboard is the board that contains the CPU, the memory, BIOS, CMOS, Video devices, sound devices, storage devices, chipsets, etc. together with the connectors and logic circuits that tie all parts of your PC together. Together with the wiring in your computer it resembles to the network of veins in your body.

3. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is considered by some to be a computer inside another computer. This isn't to far from the truth since the processor manages the huge number of instructions given to him by the other computer hardware components similar to how the computer manages the instructions you give it by using external input devices like the keyboard and mouse.

4. The "hard drive" is a storage device with one or more metal disks (called platters), arranged on a spindle, one above the other; with a read/write head (often on an arm that can be moved to a specific point on the recording surfaces. This read/write machine can probably be called the first true 'robot'. Hard drive units are sealed hermetically to keep out dust. Even the smallest particle of dust can damage the platters so it's recommended you don't open them. The most recent hard drives can have up to 1.5 Terra Bytes.

5. The video card is an essential part of any computer. It provides your computer to play video files, computer games and other things. Without a video card to convert the binary code from the CPU and transmit in a graphic way to your monitor you wouldn't be able to watch anything. In some cases the video card can be integrated on the motherboard.

6. The sound card is very much like the video card, with the small difference that instead of converting CPU binary code and send it to your monitor it uses a different type of conversion allowing you to hear sounds in your computer speakers.

7. Over the years the CD-ROM drive and the DVD-ROM have proven to be essential to a personal computer. Information transfer had at its heart this hardware component. In recent years, with the development of the Internet, flash drives and portable hard drives, CD and DVD-ROMs have started to register a slow decline from the information transfer market. They will still be around for some years to come since they are the backbone of the music and movies commercialization.

8. As a last entry to the list of computer hardware components I'll add a duo of hardware parts, namely the keyboard and the mouse without which you couldn't control you computer. That is until technologies similar to the touch screen will appear on the market, but this will undoubtedly take some time.

AMD introduced a couple of months ago the Cinema 2.0 program which will allow game developers and film producers to include photorealistic characters and objects in their works without the need of render farms. Analysts said that photorealism in CGI would be attained in about 5 years, but AMD/ATI has now teamed up with Image Metrics and claim that they are able to render photorealistic characters and environments and integrate them seamlessly into games and movies. First, take a look at what happened at the AMD conference in New York a week ago.





Now, let’s take a closer look at that Emily clip.

As you can read from the clip itself, Emily was produced using a new modeling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. The Emily you see in the clip is practically the digitized version of actress Emily O’Brien. According to TimesOnline, this is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

The team at Image Metrics has also taken care of the facial animations in Grand Theft Auto computer game. The basic aim of the company is to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical, but without using motion capture devices. So that’s how they came with the Light Stage superscanner you can see in the first two clips.

OK, we have the technology to make photorealistic characters in upcoming videogames, but what kind of supercomputer do we need to actually play at smooth frame-rates? AMD claims we only need a decent quad-core CPU coupled with their latest Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards, which can process up to 2.4 TFLOPS.

I reckon we won’t get to see characters as detailed as these before DX11 gets introduced later next year. They will double the processing power, anyway, but AMD representatives say that the line between what is real and what is computer generated will still remain visible up until 2020.

Today, I have two ASUS-related news in the same package, and while the first one should be very interesting for all gamers out there, the second is bad for ASUS, but pretty useful for those planning to buy one of their high-end sound cards revealed recently, if Creative's claims prove to be true. OK, so these being the topics, let's take'em down one by one, shall we?


First, it seems that the new Xonar DX PCI Express 7.1 audio card doesn't really offer full support for Creative Technology’s Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) 5.0. In fact, Creative claims these cards don't have any support for EAX 5.0!

"With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards," said Phil O’Shaughnessy, Creative labs' vice president of corporate communications.

Hummm... while the above may not look good at all, let's move to better things - what about a video card with 3 GPUs from ASUS? Now, that's more like it!

The upcoming Asus EAH3850 Trinity card will feature no less than three MXM modules with ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics processors onboard, for a total of 960 unified shader processors, 48 texture units and 48 render back ends. No other details about the card are known yet, such as clock and memory frequencies, and ASUS hasn't decided yet if this interesting experiment should become a commercial product or remain in the concept stage. Why?

Unfortunately, the technological solution chosen may rise the price of this new card above $500, while its performance may not be much higher than a HD 3870 X2 card, currently priced around $450.

While ASUS officials didn't comment on this story yet, it would be interesting to see such a product on the market, but only if its performance will match the price, because otherwise, they may end up with a new Voodoo 5 6000 in their sleeve...