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To get the most out of your multimedia PC, buy the best speakers you can afford. Even many name-brand PCs ship with speakers you wouldn't tolerate in a clock radio. Expect to spend at least $75 for a decent pair; if you're a serious gamer, spring for the three-piece set with an active subwoofer for about $110 and up. Your ears will thank you.
If you're thinking about adding sound to a home or business PC, don't stop there. Many cards use a digital signal processor (DSP) to provide sound along with fax and data modem and voice-mail capabilities. One of these multifunction cards can potentially kill a whole flock of birds with one stone, and cost less than the sum of its parts. Or if you're upgrading to a multimedia system, consider purchasing a multimedia upgrade kit, which will include a CD-ROM drive that should work together with the sound card.
Control Multimedia in 95
Get to know Windows 95's Multimedia control panel, located in the Control Panel folder. This all-inclusive applet now gives you access to your audio drivers, MIDI mapper, CD-ROM headphone levels and more. More advanced users can click on the Advanced tab to edit the settings for video and audio compression CODECS, media control devices and other drivers.
If you're installing a sound card and sound isn't playing the way it should be, the card may be conflicting with another device. Most installation problems occur when two devices are competing for the same system resources, often interrupt requests (IRQs) or direct-memory access addresses (DMAs). Find out what resources are being used by other devices in your system--preferably before you install your sound card. Particularly contentious devices to look out for are CD-ROM drives, SCSI cards and network cards. See how your resource situation looks with MSD.EXE, a diagnostic program included in DOS 6.0 and up.
Windows 95 should help to eliminate resource conflicts with future hardware--but what about your older, less amiable sound card? The system of IRQs and DMAs is still there under Windows 95--and the diagnostic tools are now integrated into the system. Go to the System Control Panel--or right-click on the My Computer icon and choose Properties--and click on the Device Manager tab. You can find sound cards listed under "Sound, video and game controllers." If the card isn't working properly, it will have a yellow circle with an exclamation point on it. By double-clicking on the device and clicking on the Resources tab, you can find out what resources that device is using, and what conflicts are being detected by Windows. By unchecking the box marked "Use automatic settings," you can override Windows' recommended settings and manually assign resources to the card. For a list of resources and which devices are using them, back up to the Device Manager and double-click on the Computer icon at the top of the list. This will show you every IRQ, DMA, I/O and Memory address in the system and its status.
When you install any sound card, the software will tack on several lines to your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS file with device loading statements and environment variables. These often unnecessary drivers, including those for DOS apps, can consume valuable space in memory. Check the user manual to identify which drivers are for what, or experiment by taking out various lines and rebooting to see if your applications still have sound (back up your files before modifying them). If your system still seems to work without the driver, you probably don't need it. If you're using MS-DOS 6.2*x*, you may want to set up a multiple configuration menu with separate configurations for DOS and Windows to get the optimal memory configuration for each.
Computer monitors are very sensitive to magnetic devices, which can cause distortions in picture quality. Even though multimedia speakers are designed to be magnetically shielded, it's still a good idea to place the speakers a few inches away from the monitor. You can also achieve much better stereo sound if you can place the speakers a good distance apart on your desk.
If you're shopping for a sound card, make sure it has wavetable synthesis. The good cards have 2MB or more of on-board ROM which stores instrument sounds. If your system came with a generic sound card, you can buy wavetable upgrade boards from several manufacturers. If you use a lot of MIDI music in your applications, it's worth it. Wavetable has a stored bank of actual instrument samples that sound much closer to "real" music. FM-synthesis approximates instrument sounds artificially.
When recording .WAV files, remember that the higher the sampling rate, the larger the resulting file. Files sampled at CD-quality (44.1 KHz, 16-bit) may sound great, but take up nearly 10MB per minute of recording. Unless you have storage space to burn, you should always record at the lowest sampling rate that's acceptable. For voice-only recordings, 8-bit 11KHz should be fine. When in doubt, shoot high. Most recording applications will let you convert to lower quality later to save on space.
Most DOS-based games will make you go through the one-time process of configuring for sound, usually asking for the IRQ and DMA information for your card. It's useful to have these numbers on hand whenever installing a new game. If you're using a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card, find out what settings you're using by checking the SET BLASTER statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. The syntax for the statement is SET BLASTER=Axxx Ix Dx Hx Pxxx. "A" specifies the base I/O address, "I" specifies the IRQ line, "D" specifies the 8-bit DMA channel, and "H" specifies the 16-bit DMA channel. If you don't have a SET BLASTER statement, you can add one as listed above.
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