Better PC Sound

Posted at: Friday 29th February 2008 by Chris Lee

Just how good can PC audio be? Chris Lee investigates how to get the best audio quality from your computer, then pits the humble PC against one of the best CD players on the market.

It used to be taken for granted that in order to listen to your music you needed a hi-fi in your living room. Hi-fis and midi-centres haven't completely disappeared, but nowadays, millions of people store their music on a hard disk rather than in a CD rack.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why using a PC to play music, as opposed to dedicated audio hardware, can be detrimental to your listening experience. Sound cards and PC speakers are often aimed at gamers rather than music lovers, and most popular media-playing applications prioritise convenience over pure sound quality. If you enjoy listening to music, the good news is that the PC is capable of producing much better quality audio than it's credited with by many hi-fi aficionados. As well as setting out to improve the sound of our MP3s, we also wanted to find out just how close the PC could come to high-end hi-fi equipment.

The Hi-Fi faith

High fidelity, or hi-fi, may be a slightly old-fashioned term, but it's a useful guide when it comes to improving sound quality, and remembering what it is that you're trying to achieve. After the original sound wave has been mastered and recorded to a medium, it's then the responsibility of a sound system to faithfully reproduce the information stored on that medium, be it a vinyl record or CD. The ultimate goal is that the final sound will have the same sense of space, rhythm and excitement as the original source, and a system that does this well is said to offer high fidelity, or be 'faithful to the source'.

The human ear is an incredibly sensitive organ that picks up a huge amount of data. Go to a live musical performance and you won't just hear a series of guitar chords, but also detect a wealth of tiny details, such as the different noise the guitarist's plectrum makes on the metal strings compared to their fingers, and how aggressively each individual string is struck. The sensitivity of modern recording equipment means that this kind of information is often committed to tape when the songs are recorded, and if it's present in the master, then ideally, you want to be able to hear these elements at home too.

Good-quality sound isn't just about tiny, incidental details though. When a drum kit is played at the back of the stage and a trumpet at the front, our brains not only tell us that the sounds are emanating from two different instruments, but can also discern that the drum kit is situated further away and slightly to the left of the trumpet. How we're able to process such complex calculations in real time - or why we enjoy listening to music so much in the first place - isn't a process that's fully understood. However, it's a process that's built on the purity of the sound and the power of detail.

For these reasons, we didn't just want to use the usual PC speakers to judge the subtle differences between the various digital audio compression formats, sound cards and media playing software, as even high-end PC speaker sets such as the Labs-winning Logitech Z-5500 Digital have a budget price tag and budget specifications when compared with what you can buy from specialist hi-fi firms. As a result, we carried out all the listening tests in this feature with a pair of £900 Bowers and Wilkins 683 floor-standing speakers. Of course, we needed an amplifier to power them, so we paired them with the highly rated £750 Cambridge Audio Azur 840A integrated amplifier.