About Consumer Multimedia Speakers

R E V I E W E R ’ S G U I D E

A C C O R D I N G

T O D O L B Y A N D

T H X , D O L B Y D I G I T A L E X D V D S A R E D E - S I G N E D T O B E P L A Y E D B A C K O N A 7 . 1 S U R -

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To best experience the Revolution 7.1’s awesome sound you should have:

•Seven powered speakers (left, center, right, surround (2) and rear (or center) surrounds (2). Ideally, you’ll use 6 matched speakers, plus a center speaker designed to work with the others. You can use passive speakers with a high- quality multi-channel surround receiver for even better quality playback.

•Powered subwoofer

The Revolution 7.1 works well with almost any receiver or powered speaker set. It fully supports stereo, headphones, stereo with subwoofer, 2.1 (with discrete sub- woofer), quadraphonic, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 configurations. Though 7.1 multimedia speakers sets for the consumer market are just appearing, 7.1 is firmly entrenched in the home theater receiver market. See additional information about speakers in the next section, and refer to the “7.1 Surround Sound Receivers” section for a list of some of the many 7.1 receivers currently available.

Content

You can use your favorite game, movie, DVD, MP3, WMA or other audio file, or just about anything else. However, the appendix lists sample scenes and songs that make great test content for certain applications. We recommend you use the rec- ommended content unless you have known content that you are comfortable with. Not all movies, for example, are mixed with use of surround channels, which can skew a surround listening test.

Revolution’s audio quality exceeds that of any consumer multimedia speaker system. Consequently, you should use the best speakers and amplifiers available for your evaluation.

•If you do not have access to a quality 7.1 home theater receiver and speakers, you can use any off-the-shelf multimedia system.

•If using a set of multimedia speakers, it is best to use a “higher end” set rather than an inexpensive set with poor sound quality. Klipsch, Logi- tech, Cambridge, Midiland, and Harman Kardon can be good sources for better quality multimedia speakers. Creative’s Inspire 6.1 offers an additional surround speaker, but at under $100, we believe the set sacri- fices quality for price.

Speaker availability. As of March 2003, 7.1 multimedia speaker sets were not generally available. This is largely because 6.1/7.1 sound cards are only now reaching the retail market. Now that these sound cards are available, several speaker manufacturers have begun development of 7.1 multimedia speaker sets.

Since Revolution provides discrete 7.1 line outputs, some users may elect to “upgrade” their existing 5.1 multimedia speaker set by connecting a stereo set of powered speakers to the rear surround channel. Though this may not provide