You may already have a home sound studio in your desktop computer, and not know it.
Newer machines generally support 44kHz audio sampling rates at 16 or 32 bits, which is CD-Quality sound. If your machine was manufactured in the last two or three years, and it has (or you bought) a CD-ROM player, you probably already know you can play audio CD’s. You can also play audio files, such as MIDI, WAV or the Mac .snd sound files. If these files were recorded to CD audio standards, they are very large files (about ten megabytes per minute of play time), but they can contain stereo sound of truly awesome theater quality.
But you might not have suspected this. Realistic computer audio has mainly been marketed to the action game crowd. Your machine has internal speakers which are adequate for playing the “PC Beep”, and AV machines come equipped with attached or external mini-speakers which produce surprisingly credible sounds — until you compare them to the stereo or home entertainment system in the living room.
None of these “PC speaker” systems reproduce audio at nearly the quality of the original CD or audio file. The problem isn’t the sound quality of the home computer, but the playback speakers and amplifier.
Built-In Amplifier Costs
Major brand names in consumer audio, like Creative, Advent, Bose and JBL, have cashed in on the realistic audio craze and are pumping out very expensive amplified versions of regular old compact stereo speakers. From their point of view, it makes sense: every speaker sale is an electronics sale. If you like good music and good sound, this can be a serious waste of money.
Here’s what they don’t tell you.
The audio signal output from the home computer to these amplified speakers is a standard 1-volt reference level, meaning it is the same standardized signal strength as is output from tape decks, cassette players, CD players and video sound out. The typical Mac or PC outputs this 1-volt signal from a stereo minijack (“headphone jack”) on the back of the machine. This is usually the case whether audio processing is built-in, or is handled by a sound card like Creative Labs SoundBlaster.
Any of these devices, including the home computer sound out jack, can be cabled into the “tape”, “CD’, “video”, “aux” or other “line level” input jacks on a stereo receiver or home entertainment center. Add an inexpensive stereo receiver, and even cheap bookshelf speakers, and you have a sound output which will blow the socks off even the better “PC speakers”.
You can buy a “Y” cable at Fry’s, Radio Shack or elsewhere which splits the input from a stereo minijack into a left (black) and a right (red) channel regular stereo RCA pin jack. Once you have this (less than $5), none of the rest of it is rocket science.
Because the 1-volt signal is already “preamplified”, you can run it a considerable distance, at least 20 feet (probably much farther, with standard shielded audio cable). You don’t have to find space to put a stereo right next to your computer. One volt doesn’t sound like much, but that’s 1,000 times the signal coming out of the record turntable, if you still have one of these.
If and when you get a CD-ROM recorder, by all means use it to start making regular data backups. But don’t neglect to experiment with making your own audio CD’s.
If your stereo receiver has a “line out” or “tape out” jack, you can patch this to the audio input jack on your computer (usually also a stereo minijack) so you can control the audio input, as well as the output, of your computer. This makes traditional receiver sound sources, like cassette, tuner, tape or record player, available to your computer for recording. Warning: never, ever take audio signals from the loudspeaker terminals. This is a much higher voltage and will probably fry your sound card. Use the “line” level output jacks.
With your home studio, you can take audio cuts from your favorite tapes, records, or CD’s. Simple audio switchboxes can help you control wire routing without constantly plugging and unplugging connections if, for example, you prefer to still keep your “PC Speakers” for routine home computing tasks.
You can play CD’s either on your computer’s player, or on an external player hooked to your stereo receiver. And you can monitor these sounds on a high-quality computer stereo system.
If you don’t plan to do any recording, of course you don’t need your home computer to do this, but if you plan to play CD’s or audio files through your home computer, you won’t believe how good your home computer sound actually is, until you play it back through a real stereo sound system.
Bigger and Better
If you were already an audiophile before, watch out! I had been running off an old mini-stereo everything-in-a-box system. Now I’ll confess: I went down to Good Guys because I wanted better speakers for the rear channels. I bought a pair of good conventional stereo bookshelf speakers. They sound SO much better than anything else in the system, that now I want “real” front speakers and a real receiver to drive them!
Don’t defeat all this work with the thin “spider web wires” that come with compact stereo speakers. Always connect speakers with 16-gauge lamp cord or even Monster Cable.
The part of all this that should interest everybody is that the central component in this system is the personal home computer. For recording, all sound editing will be done on the computer monitor with software: cutting, editing, fade-in, fade-out, splicing or even overdubbing.
I have always been somewhat of an audio freak, but the available technology for high-quality sound mixers had always been beyond my reach. It all comes free nowadays with a sound card, or the recording software products which are bundled with CD-R’s, like Toast or EZ-CD Creator. CD sound quality has definitely arrived on the home PC scene!
THX88S Sound
If you want a PC “startup sound” and music system that sounds just as awesome as the electrifying “THX88S Sound” you’ve heard on the movie theater sound systems, chances are you already have the central component of your new sound system, and are reading this article on it now.
This article was originally published in the November 1998 This Mac’s Pen, the newsletter of the Peninsula Apple Users Group.
Copyright Alex Forbes ©November 2, 1998
