Last month we looked at how a good pair of headphones can transform your listening experience from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This month we take a look at how great sound can be had at home, where a music library is increasingly lodged in PCs and Laptops. As you know the usual desktop speakers or those built into your laptops are hardly capable of delivering hi-fi sound quality, but that doesn’t mean you cannot  get good sound from a computer based music set up. Today the PC/Laptop has become central to life, not only in the office but also at home. People find that a lot of their music is stored on their computers and the common lament is - if only sound quality was better. But why lament, this can be achieved quite easily, just get a better pair of speakers and a good sound card. A good sound card is crucial to getting a good audio signal from the PC.

Some of best computer speakers available in the market are the  Audio Engine 2 (Rs 10000/= a pair), M Audio Studiophile  av 40 (Rs 12000/= a pair), Bose companion 2 series II (Rs 8000/= a pair), NHT pro M 00 (Rs 15000/= a pair, these may be a bit difficult to find though, but worth the extra money), Altec Lansing  MX-5021 (Rs 12000/= including sub woofer) as also the higher priced MX 6021, Creative Gigaworks T3 (Rs 15000/= including sub woofer), T20 (Rs 7000/= a pair) as also the higher priced T40 and Logitech Z2300 (Rs 10000/= including sub woofer). If you are an enthusiast and want something even better you could consider the B&W MM1 (Rs 32,000/= a pair), the Audio Engine 5 (Rs 22,000/= a pair) or the Focal XS (Rs 35,000/= including sub woofer) or the amazing Magnepan Mini Maggie planar desktop speaker system (Rs 90,000/= including sub woofer).

Thing is a 2, 2.1 desktop system can deliver only so much and cannot be a substitute for a dedicated home music system. The solution is to connect your PC to your music system. This can be easily done by using a mini phone jack-RCA cable to connect your PC to your music system. So far so simple, but this is where it can get more complex depending on your expectations of what constitutes good sound quality. For enthusiasts who are looking for a computer based high end home audio system, there are numerous options limited only by the amount of money they are willing to spend and their individual perception of what it is worth.

The first step would be to get a top quality sound card. Built in cards that come with PCs are incapable of delivering a clean audio signal due to electro-magnetic interference (EMI) induced in the audio circuits inside PC cabinets. This gets added to the music signal and amplified before it is reproduced by the speakers. Audiophile quality cards come with EMI protection shields and other proprietary design implementations to eliminate this interference. One of the major players when it comes to sound cards and among the best known is Creative but there are many other brands which offer cards with exceptional sound quality. Some highly rated cards include the Asus Xonar Essence ST/STX (Rs 9500/=), Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music (Rs 9000/=), HT Omega Claro+ (Rs 8000/=), ASUS Xonar D2X (Rs 9000/=), Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal 1ty Professional (Rs 8500/=), Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 DE (Rs 2800), Auzentech Auzen X-Fi Forte (Rs 9200/=), Auzentech Auzen X-Fi Bravura (Rs 8800/=), HT Omega Striker 7.1 (Rs 5000/=), M-Audio Delta Audiophile 192 (Rs 9500/=), M-Audio Audiophile 2496 (Rs 7200/=), Turtle Beach Montego DDL (Rs 1500/=), Audiotrak Prodigy HD2 (Rs 7100/=), ESI Juli@ (Rs 8000/=) and E-MU 0404 (Rs8000/=). There are of course cheaper options and at the other extreme, some high end cards like Lynx AES16 (Rs 42,000/=) and RME HDSP 9652 Hammerfall DSP (Rs 45,000/=) capable of handling 24bit/192kHz files (some of the cards mentioned above are also 24bit/192kHz capable), but they are a lot more expensive and used more in professional set ups and very high end systems.

You could also use external USB/Firewire sound cards (commonly known as audio interfaces) which have multiple inputs/outputs, provide  a lot more flexibility and sound quality wise a much better option. You can directly hook up a wide range of hardware (music sources) like smartphones, iPods/iPads, external hard drives, CD/DVD players, musical instruments etc to your music/home theatre system. Many of the cards listed above are also available in external versions besides there is still a wide range available at different price levels, to choose from. Of course the cheaper cards only provide basic inputs/outputs and commensurate sound quality.

Lastly if you do not like the clutter of a lot of wires going into and coming out of your PC/music system, you can wirelessly access the music on your PC through a WiFi Media Streamer. This is also considered to be the best way to access music from your PC and said to give the best sound quality. All you need is a wireless system like the Logitech Wireless Music System or the Sirocco Wireless Audio Bridge, or the Audioengine AW1 Wireless Audio Adapter, or Linksys WMB54G Wireless-G Music Bridge or Apple’s Airport Express, to name a few, consisting of a transmitter which attaches to your PC and a receiver that plugs into your amp/receiver and you can stream music from your PC to your music system. Most of them have a remote with which you can control the music being played.  But to get the best sound quality there more sophisticated but relatively expensive devices and solutions like the Logitech (previously Slim Devices) Squeezebox Touch (Rs 18,000/=) and Duet (Rs 13,000/=), Roku Soundbridge M1000 (Rs 15,000/=), Sonos ZP 90 (Rs 20,000/=), not to mention other high end devices.

To conclude it is presumed as a prerequisite, that your music is stored in the form of uncompressed WAV files or in lossless formats like FLAC or Apple Lossless or WMA lossless. If it is stored in a highly compressed, lossy format like MP3 with a bit rate of 128 kbps, the sound quality cannot be expected to be hi-fi, though MP3 with a bit rate of 320 kbps is considered to be practically lossless. All prices quoted in the course of the article are approximate and street prices can vary considerably. At the end of the day it all depends on what each individual is looking for in a music system. Being a very subjective issue, what is music for one person can be distortion for the next and let me assure you that you could spend a fortune and still be searching for the ultimate sound. What matters is that you are able to enjoy the music whatever your set up. Happy listening!

~ Stanley Paul