These are the settings I always enable for use with Philips SHP1900
headphones and Logitech S220 2.1 speakers
. Bass boost doesn't do much for the speakers, but the headphones sound flat without it. I need loudness equalization for all the different audio and video I watch/listen too ... which may have lower or higher volume the entire length or just in certain places. Loudness equalization pretty much evens everything out, so you don't have to touch the volume dial in Windows or on your speakers.This is what I usually do on any computer I use, no matter what kind of sound card they have ... I looked it up in device manager only for this blog post... Right now my sound card is "AMD High Definition Audio Device".
I'm an average user, so I don't need any special audio software or settings, but professionals usually bypass the sound card by using an external DAC
device or tap into the unprocessed digital signal coming through the video card's HDMI port.Once again, this category of users also don't care what sound cards they have, as the quality of the audio will depend exclusively on their external device.
In the old days of ISA sound cards it was up to the user to make it as good as possible, by choosing a better slot for the card, moving all cables as far as possible to avoid interference and disconnect the CD-ROM audio cable, which almost certainly gathered some interference from other components, even from the CD-ROM.
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| Yamaha Audician 32 Plus |
This was my first sound card I bought for my 80486SX
25MHz computer. It didn't have all the fancy features to digitally connect an IDE CD-ROM
, but it managed to generate some very impressive sounds (for that time) and I even connected it to a joystick once, through it's MIDI/GAME port.We played a lot of Mortal Kombat 2
on that PC, it ran really well, but some of the more sophisticated games ran about 30% slower if sound was enabled, so for competitive gaming (like the first Command and Conquer on two computers, linked through a serial COM cable) we usually switched off sound completely ...