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Tara: Steve Silberman from AudioQuest gave us some great tips on computer audio.
Steve: There's a number of great ways you can connect your computer to your stereo.
The simplest way to do it is just using an analog cable. Pretty much every computer out
there today has a headphone jack so you can take advantage of that. You can simply just
plug a mini 3.5mm cable into your computer, and if you have one that has stereo RCAs on
the other end you're connected and you're up and running and you've got computer audio.
If you want to do something that's a little bit more sophisticated , let's say that you
have a surround sound receiver that has available digital inputs on it or you just purchased
a new DAC (digital to audio converter). With an Apple computer, they typically have a Toslink
out. So you can get one of these optical cables. It plugs into the same port as the headphone,
overrides the headphone and now you've got digital out so you can send all the data that's
stored either in your computer or on the external hard drive. You can send that digitally across
to the receiver, or to the DAC, and have it decoded there and that will give you significantly
higher resolution than just using the analog output.
A lot of computers also come now with an HDMI connection. HDMI is pretty much the standard
for audio/video connections in the home theater world. If you have an HDMI connection on your
computer you could simply take advantage of that. You could use the HDMI connection to
go from the computer to the stereo. I would say this would give you equal performance
to the Toslink , not better, not worse, but pretty much equal.
The trend though is moving towards USB. There's a number of products coming out that have
digital USB inputs on them. And with the USB, you simply connect to one of the USB ports
and you bring that to a DAC and now you've got a transmission line between the computer
and the DAC. These tend to offer the highest performance of all your different options.
So beyond the different connections that are available, there's different quality cables.
This is a pretty generic cable. It uses insulation or a dielectric that will have some interference.
It also uses stranded wire which has some interesting distortions and interactions.
What we like to do at AudioQuest is we'll use wire that is solid core metal so there's
less distortion there, and we use a dielectric or an insulation that has very little interference.
The other thing we'll do is we'll pay attention to the actual pins. How we plate the pins,
whether they're plated with gold or they're plated with silver will have a direct consequence
on how good the cable sounds.
Tara: If you have any questions on cables or computer audio just give us a call.