How to Upgrade your PC or Console’s Audio
If you are still rocking your TV or monitors’ built in speakers, cheap headphones or hand-me-down speakers, you might want to consider an upgrade to your audio setup. In this video, I want to walk you through the different ways you can do that and give you some options to consider, so let’s jump into it. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
There are two main ways to improve your audio, how you listen to it, and how it’s processed. Let’s start with the more obvious one, how you hear it. If you still use your TV or monitors built in speakers, chances are you aren’t having the best time in the world on them. Especially with monitor speakers, they are normally compressed, tinny, and low power. A good option is a solid 2.1 speaker kit, you can pick these up for £40-50 and upwards, with even the Logitech Z333’s with their fake tweeters being reasonable-sounding.
Another option is to pick up a set of bookshelf speakers like the Edifier ones I reviewed a while back, those are fantastic, and if you go for the £90 version instead of the £60 ones you get bluetooth built in too.
If you are gaming on a TV, another great option is a sound bar, there are hundreds of options in the sub £100 category, although none I’ve reviewed personally so can’t say for sure what’s good. As with everything, make sure to check out reviews of the products before buying them.
If you prefer keeping to yourself, or want the competitive edge in gaming thanks to more obvious directional sound, headphones are a great option too. Especially for gaming, there are options from £20 up to hundreds, with some notable ones being Corsair’s range, the HS35s, VOID Elite, and their more premium Virtuoso. Steelseries and HyperX also make some good stuff too.
Of course, that isn’t the only option. Getting a “normal” set of headphones, say from someone like Sennheiser or even AudioTechnica, and strapping an Antlion Modmic to the side, is brilliant as you get great audio quality from the headset, and a solid mic to go with it.
So, that’s how you listen to the sound, but what about processing it? Well the thing is, no matter how good your speakers or headphones are, if you can’t convert the 1s and 0s of the audio to clean voltage waves to move the drivers well, you are still going to get a naff sound.
Most motherboards today come with a Realtek ALC1220 Codec chip which is the audio processor, and converts the digital signal to analogue (DAC). This does a pretty good job and for most people is fine, but not all machines have that. So, you’ve got a few options. On consoles, external boxes are the only way to go, things like the Creative Sound Blaster G3 or G6 are great options – and for PC too – or your headphones might have one built in like the rather premium Steelseries Arctis Pro +GAMEDAC.
You can go higher end than those too, including with people like SCHIIT audio who I believe I may be reviewing in the not-too-distant future, but for the sake of this video I’m going to keep it cheap.
If you are on PC, you can also use a PCIe add in card like the Soundblaster AE-5. It’s not overly common to see these, as external AMP/DAC units normally do just as good a job, if not better, but it is an option if you’d prefer less dongles.
I think that’s a good place to leave it for now, there are a good number of options there to help you move away from built in speakers and get better audio quality across the board
