Digital audio fun
When I was at uni, I had a pretty nice little audio setup. It consisted of the ever-popular Creative Live! Platinum 5.1 audio card (with the nice front panel inputs) combined with a 4 speaker Cambridge Soundworks woofer / tweeter setup.
Not exactly a sound engineering setup, however it sounded great to me. The best feature was that I could have digital audio thanks to the Creative DIN connection from my Soundblaster to the speakers. This meant everything sounded crystal clear, with no cable noise or anything (you could turn the volume all the way up without a hint of a buzz).
The Soundblaster also had some cool features for the aspiring young artist that I was including sound fonts and midi-input / outputs that worked nicely with my Yamaha natural action electric piano. It was just a pity the card wasn’t that good from a recording point of view and there was a lot of noise on my tracks. Also, I didn’t really have the required talent to become anything much of a musician.
Anyway, I recently upgraded to a new computer with an on-board Realtek soundcard. Unfortunately the drivers for the two cards didn’t play too well together and I had to make the difficult decision to remove my ageing Soundblaster. This of course had the effect that I could no longer use the proprietary digital connection on my speakers and they therefore started to sound muddy and lifeless. That was until I did some research on the connection and found that the Creative DIN connection was in fact a bunch of SPDIF connections. I also came across a cable that was packaged with the speakers to take the digital connection from the little yellow 3.5mm jack on the top of most Soundblasters.
So, it was just a matter of getting a Male-RCA to Female-3.5mm converter to plug into the Realtek SPDIF and now I have nice digital sound from my new computer!! It’s so good to hear every imperfection in the MP3s. I know people are looking at me strangely, but I found it exciting. The rear speakers are not working just yet, but I’ll get to them soon.