PCI Sound Card

A: The Auzentech PCI sound cards provide pure audiophile-quality playback.

It's the era of portable MP3 players, and if you're an audiophile, you can be forgiven for feeling a little ignored. Whatever happened to absolute fidelity and multi-channel playback? Down-sampled music with a reduced frequency range and limited to two-channels has co-opted the definition of "hi-fi." That's where Auzentech's PCI sound cards come to the rescue.

In a perfect world, if you had a lossless source file (possible from DVD audio), you would also use lossless playback.  Your CD offers 16 bit resolution at 44.1 kHz, which your sound card can handle. When you play DVD audio, the sampling rate is generally 24 bit/ at 96KHz. The maximum is 24 bit at 192 KHz. To hear the music in its full glory requires something most PC owners lack: a PCI Sound Card capable of the same resolution playback.

Similarly, if your music is encoded with multi-channel surround sound data, as with movies or audio DVDs, a PCI Sound Card capable of handling the information can give reliable playback. Otherwise, the audio is down-sampled into something less. And that's not fidelity.

One of the best approaches for PC audio enthusiasts is to send the output from your PCI Sound Card into your home theater receiver. Auzentech's X-Mystique sound card was the first add-in sound card available that would encode a Dolby® Digital 5.1 signal. On the heels of the X-Mystique sound card came the X-Plosion, the first certified Dolby® Digital Live (DDL) and DTS-Connect PCI Audio board, and the perfect companion for home theater receivers both new and old.

The X-Plosion provides up to 7.1 channels of surround sound. The quality difference is noticeable for MP3s, Games, and movie playback. Both PCI Sound Cards can handle 24-bit output at 96 KHz for true fidelity.

For that discerning group of audiophiles who can hear the difference, Auzentech has developed the X-Meridian PCI sound card. This sound card will handle 24-bit output at 192 KHz, the maximum for DVD audio. It also supports DDL and DTS-Connect, providing between 5.1 and 7.1 channels of pure digital surround sound.

When you are not working with a pure source, these PCI Sound Cards can help heal the sound of your MP3s with up-sampling, restoring the multi-channel output to your two-channel recordings.

Auzentech's line of PCI Sound Cards are affordable, flexible solutions that allow audiophiles to hear their music in its full glory. And if you have a collection of down-sampled MP3s, the music will sound better when played through the X-Mystique, X-Plosion, or X-Meridian PCI sound cards. And if you don't yet consider yourself to be an audiophile, the Auzentech sound card is a solid first step.

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Category: Soundcards. Date published: May 22, 06