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DVD enthusiasts hail the king
What's of course fantastic is the fact that you are surrounded by many, many speakers. When you playback a DTS ES or Dolby Digital EX DVD you'll sit back, relax and chill with a nice smile on your face and that experience is of course fantastic. I have the DTS ES version of Lord of the Rings - Two Towers. I can tell you that is is extremely fun to listen to it. DTS ES however is 6.1 channel sound and it's as much as you'll get from the newest DVD right now. 7.1 is not yet standard and it'll take a while before it'll become common standard though. I'll settle for the 6.1 though. The speakers sound very rich and are extremely adequate to be used for DVD playback. In fact, although a lot of money, I can see these puppies behave in a Home Theater PC extremely well.
Gladiator - Ah Maximus, you could even rename this speaker set to Coliseum as they can easily carry that name. The entire movie is simply a joy to of course watch, but in this case listen to as well. Rich and sharp sound, no distortion. These speakers deliver what they should in very high quality sound. I never had the feeling that the speakers where lacking power, though we did drive it close to its maximum. That BASH amplifier in there produces enough juice. As the battle raged, arrows flew across the soundstage from front to rear, convincingly popping and whizzing. The center speaker delivered dialogue clearly, striking a good sense of balance between brightness and smoothness of the treble so that voices sound clear, dialog is sharp and the movie soundtrack full and rich.
The richness of detail in sound combined with the volume makes me state that this kit can actually fill up a normal sized living room. Noises are sharp, explosions deep in Black Hawk Down, and after watching Bad boys II, gunshots are really convincing! I could write up a long story about the DVD playback experience, but if it's good it's good you know.
Gaming!
Never ever in the past year if you would have asked me that 7.1 would really make a difference over 5.1 in games I would have believed that. But I have to tell you, it really does make a difference. Gamers will be able to enjoy true 7.1 surround sound using the Audigy 2/4s OpenAL and DirectSound3D audio processors. And the best thing yet thanks to that, almost any DirectX title can support 7.1 channel surround sound because it part of a standard DirectX feature.
Once I installed the speakers I decided to immediately startup a game or two to see if I could hear the difference, and this is a true story. 5 hours later I stopped playing games. I was, and now I can really put this word to good use, flabbergasted. The surround sound experience is just amazing.
Lord of the Rings, Battle for middle Earth
...the eye of Mordor says "I see you..." You hear that sound creeping all the way behind of you slowly going to the left. While at the front right you'll hear water and in the middle left you can hear horses stampeding. You see how difficult it is to describe? The in-game 7.1 sound is so overwhelming that I find it hard to explain. In every little corner there is a little sound and if you move over the map these sounds will start to move relative from your viewing position. It seriously is one spectacular sound experience. Sounds are just everywhere at the best possible audio quality. I love this game and the Audigy 4 Pro / Gigaworks S750 combo complements that experience bigtime.
Truly Amazing. The subwoofer is an Orc monster, in a positive way :)
Medal of Honor - Pacific Assault
The same thing happened on Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault. We enabled 7.1 sound and configured the game with EAX 3.0
What a lovely game .. fantastic game play, great graphics and now I was able to play it in 7.1 sound. Let me try to describe a little scene. At one point in the game you arrive at an airstrip. You need to man an AA gun and shoot incoming enemy planes. Once seated, hell breaks loose. Dozens of planes you will need to shoot down. From the left and the right. In front of you, behind you in the left rear and so on. Everything I just stated you will hear in the proper position. If a planes arrives in the rear right or wherever you will hear them coming from there. Combine that with the yelling soldiers surrounding you, the huge explosions and many other environmental positioned sound and you are in one of the most thrilling game experiences ever.
Now I could tell you that the difference between 5.1 and 7.1 is small, but really at this point I'm convinced that the 7.1 solution is a better choice. I had some other people listen and observe a couple of games and well, their mouth almost fell open. It really is extremely convincing.
Now this is environmental sound talk only. Sound quality of course is way up there at the highest level among computer speakers. Full, dynamic sound, explosions that'll make your ears hurt, that and yelling neighbors! I have nothing else to say about sound quality other then it is at the highest level and you'll be more than satisfied.
