...That's a very liberal interpretation of a smiley
That is literally that smiley's history. It's unique to Head-Fi and has been around for years. I used to know (but have since forgotten) who actually made it too. I'm sure that information is still present
somewhere.
Haha, never experienced an OLED screen before, huh? Yeah, the colors are rich and bright, but they don't have to be blinding.
No, I have. And I have a few devices with OLED screens. The Stealth's is just *very* bright. Just like some LEDs are subdued and acceptable, and others are bright enough to do Lasik.
h34r:
Of course a simple display like on the Stealth isn't going to have much options in regards to tweaking the brightness. They are really great when used appropriately. My smartphone has one and images are absolutely gorgeous on it. The bottom line is, I just hate the electronics industry's obsession with blue LEDs. Give me green or red or any other warm color any day, but blue and higher wavelengths I want nothing to do with...including white, which is usually "cool white," which is just a blue LED with phosphorescent coating (same principle fluorescent lights work on). My monitor also has blue power LED that got the electrical tape treatment.
I'm with you - I don't know what the obsession with blue is in recent years. I'm old enough to remember when everything was amber or green, and I don't get what the problem was with any of that.
It really seems like I need to see (and hear) these things in person before buying anything.
Generally I'd agree with this, but unfortunately that may be hard (if not impossible) depending on the gear you want to try, and so forth. But thankfully a lot of online retailers allow in-home trials or have good return policies, so ultimately what it comes down to is make the best decision you can based on the information you *can* get, and try something with the knowledge that it may be returned for something else. And that's that.
Of course it's for marketing. Most businesses don't give a damn about the environment.
Aye.
Call me crazy, but every little bit helps.
So is it really so hard to just turn the device off yourself? Instead of giving up continuous running power for the supervisor IC to do that for you?
(yes I'm being a little facetious here)
And even gaming computers don't draw 1 KW. Maybe if it uses multiple graphics cards, it might, but even with a single, high-end card, you won't be pulling that much under load and certainly not when idle. A PC at idle might use 200-300 W. So when people buy a power supply with the highest output, they're really screwing themselves over, as they are running nowhere near the peak efficiency range, which is 60-80% of the PSU's output rating during whatever tasks you most commonly do on your computer. But I digress...
Alright, we can have that conversation too
:
1) A high end, and I mean legitimately high end, gaming PC can use around 1kW under full load today. I'm talking multiple top-shelf GPUs, top shelf CPUs, elaborate cooling system, multiple displays, etc. The probably most extreme consumer implementation I can think of would be LinusTechTips' "7 Gamers 1 PC" build which was drawing around 1600W at the wall under load, and is probably about the limit of what you can do with off the shelf consumer hardware. Knocking that down to something that a single power user would have, ~1kW isn't so insane with a top-shelf 2011 platform and 2-4 high end cards (a quartet of top-end cards is going to be 1000W at peak on its own, for example). A more mid-range system with a single graphics card and high end CPU can still do >500W, especially if you're overclocking (and I can "cheat" here and include really nutty graphics hardware, like Devil13 or Titan Z, and get the power draw up there to the nosebleeds).
2) 200-300W is disgusting for a modern system at idle (and by modern I mean like "last 8 years"). Modern *everything* throttles a lot better than that (or it darn well should), to the point that even "nutty" configurations will still idle at <200W as long as you aren't defeating power saving features. Modern multi-GPU platforms will disable the slave GPUs at idle (if they aren't driving monitors), and GPUs throttle themselves down so well as to use almost nothing when not working heavily; ditto on CPUs (to say nothing of the general decrease in CPU power consumption over the last ten years). Roll the clock back to say, ~2005, and have a complete QuadFX "Quadfather" system, and yeah you might realize 300W+ at idle, but that's not contemporary by any means.
3) Modern 80+ SMPS are efficient at any loading (its part of the 80 Plus certificate), especially the "higher" levels of 80+ (e.g. Gold, Platinum, Titanium) - buying a larger power supply isn't "screwing yourself over" or anything of the sort, and the absolute top capacity units (e.g. Corsair AX1500i, EVGA SuperNOVA 1600W Titanium, etc) are going to be more efficient at low output than most economy 300-400W PSUs (e.g. both driving 100W out) simply because they're that much better overall.* The era of SMPS only being "good" at ~50% loading is long since gone, and this is deliberate as power saving features have improved on contemporary PC hardware - if the PSU becomes unstable or inefficient at low draw it kind of defeats the purpose of the hardware throttling its consumption down. Generally speaking there's no downside to surplus capacity, but there can be a lot of problems if you're trying to push the PSU at 80-100% of its rated output for extended periods (usually heat related).
* Don't believe me? Believe the numbers:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story4&reid=378
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story4&reid=489
Compare numbers at the ~300W point since that's common to both tests. Is this a "fair" comparison? Maybe not, but you aren't getting 1kW+ PSUs that aren't putting up excellent efficiency numbers because nobody is doing split-phase, and nobody wants to deal with the waste heat, so in terms of "actual products that you can buy" its a thing. There are *some* smaller capacity units that also post up >90% efficiency numbers, but they're usually overpriced.
Ah OK, I didn't realize it would just apply a massive cut to the frequencies above the setting.
That's all a high-pass/low-pass/crossover is going to do. There are some really aggressive crossover units out there that can do really steep roll-off (like 48 dB/oct or 96 dB/oct) but I honestly can't imagine a good use for them at playback.
Nope, manual had no info on this.
c'est la vie
Just said to use your speaker's stated frequency response range as a guide to dialing it in.
And if it was an actual crossover that'd be great, but I guess better than nothing. :rolleyes:
OK, so more marketing then with the "crossover" feature in the drivers.
I honestly would guess its probably more that it *is* a valid setting in multi-ch output, and nobody ever thought to nix that setting when not in multi-ch, than some sort of advertising fluff.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a soundcard with a sub output, probably because PC speakers aren't designed with that kind of thing in mind.
It's there and it isn't. 5.1 (or 6.1, or 7.1, etc) cards will generally have a "Center/Sub" output, and 5.1 (or higher) speakers will generally have TRS connections that include a line for that Center/Sub connection, which gives them a direct line for the sub. In theory there's no reason you can't just send the .1 out on that and not have the center output active, but I've never seen that implemented. PC speakers are weird, I think largely because there's never been a big push towards standardization/common-ness, especially when you go back to the era of true "multimedia hardware" being a thing, and various configurations were available from a huge range of manufacturers. I think Logitech is the only one still doing 5.1 PC speakers these days, and those accept digital input alongside analog.
In my experience, the power connects to the sub, and the left speaker connects to the card and right speaker, so I guess that's not true 2.1 either, nor is it when the speaker connecting to the card is directly powered or however I have my setup.
Usually in a 2.1 (or n.1) PC speaker setup, the amplifier is built-in to the subwoofer's enclosure because its the biggest space, so that's where AC power has to connect, and everything connects back to it as well. Of course this isn't standardized in any way, and all sorts of proprietary stuff is out there too (e.g. you have signal and power sharing an umbilical between the sub/amp and a speaker that doubles as a control module or whatever else a designer/manufacturer thought looked cool, would be more ergonomic, etc). Now technically those setups can be considered "true 2.1" because they have a crossover in there - so you're taking stereo line level from the card -> device input, which has the crossover, and then it sends the crossed signals out to the amplifiers (that's more efficient than doing it the other way), and then on to the speakers. And that crossover point is fixed based on assumptions/knowledge about the individual speakers in the package.
However in recent years, "PC speakers" have become the black sheep of desktop audio, and "multimedia hardware" has pretty much curled up and died, so the hip and trendy thing to do is to take a pair of powered active monitors and hook those up to your PC. But people want a subwoofer because they want some more boom boom, and then you get endless "but how do I plug together????" questions because the PC isn't really equipped for that connectivity, and for [who knows why] nobody has really stepped in to fill this niche in a nice way. I'm not saying going back to the "old" style of speakers is a universally better thing, but it was certainly more straight-forward in terms of connectivity and use.
Makes sense, I guess. Of course, with these higher end cards, you'd think they might have a separate LFE output. The STX only has the one stereo speaker out. There is Dolby Virtual Speaker, this is not remapping either? I guess some day I'll invest in a AVR...someday and have a regular soundcard for DSP processing. The STX II has a daughterboard expansion for 7.1 support. I guess this was a big complaint about the original. I know the clock was, which they also improved on the II.
STX is one of those weird "for audiophiles 2ch only" devices that were trendy a few years ago. I never understood the rationale - you take an excellent multi-ch codec or audio processor which probably has pretty solid drivers behind it (e.g. C-Media, Creative, VIA, whatever) and then strip it down to 2ch only and charge people extra dinero for less features.
Cards that have n.1 output will have separate LFE connections, but again I've never seen it implemented where it can do 2.1 or 4.1 on the card - it seems to assume you're going to use a package system that brings its own crossover. This is dumb even in the world of AVRs, because generally speaking AVRs won't digitize their multi-channel inputs, so there's no bass management, time alignment, etc there (there's two units that I'm aware of that actually digitize their multi-channel inputs and can do bass management, time alignment, etc; the cheaper one was around $12,000 when it was in production, the more expensive one was about thrice that), and not all cards offer that functionality. Of course, back in the day (before DDL and DTSC) this was better than nothing.
The multi-channel RCA connections were en vogue more recently, but honestly I never got the appeal - its like spend (often a lot of) extra money to save having to buy a few bucks of TRS to RCA adapters. And its also something that came about *after* DDL/DTSC, and generally those cards offer one or both of those suites, so you could just use that and let the AVR do its thing with a digital signal. Or use HDMI from a graphics card.
So anyways, what does this matter? If you want a proper 2.1 setup you need a crossover from the 2ch output - older style PC speakers are doing that internally and it works as well as it works, but the monitor + sub thing will require an external box.
Dolby Virtual Speaker is designed to simulate surround sound from stereo speakers. The card/drivers/etc (throw it in a black box and don't worry about *where* it happens) should be taking your 5.1 or whatever and making it 2.0 for output, and Virtual Speaker can act upon multi-ch signals to the output, but whether or not you like the effect is up to your preference. I've tried a few systems with VS in the past and honestly I'm not wowed by it, but its a neat feature to toy around with.
The era of hardware-assisted audio is long since come and gone - there's really no point these days, as nothing is using it. Just get a nice codec/output device and be happy with software implementations that "just work."
I mean, if you like that sound, of course that's liable to be heaven for you, but let's just say I'm decidedly *not* in that camp. 
