How to Get the Best Audio Quality From Your Computer

Series Summary

Computers are complex machines built upon very simple principles. They perform arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform digital information moving at lightning speed into usable human data. A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a platform for the digital life. In this free video series on computers, an experienced software developer offers a few tips on maintaining a computer or laptop. Find out how to clean up a hard drive to keep the computer running smoothly, and understand how to adjust the mouse speed and audio settings. Learn about the different sizes of hard drives that are available, and get tips on choosing the right external hard drive for backing up work. Understand the ins and outs of computers and laptops to better maintain them.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to get the best audio quality from your computer. Let's go to our computer and we're going to pull up our control panel by clicking on the start button. And now I'm going to do a search here in Vista for control which returns the control panel. Now in the classic view, let's make sure that, or rather find the sounds of item in this classic view. So open that up. Now this opens Vista's Interface for managing audio on your computer. What we're concern with is our speakers and the output that we're getting from them. So we want to highlight our speakers, or rather double click on them and that pulls up the speakers properties. They have several items here to look up, I'm going to go to levels. Now if you're outputting audio from your computer into some other device, it's typically not a good idea to run your level at a 100% 'cause that's going to introduce some gain in the signal and if you amplify it from the source and then send it to another amplifier to get audio out of it, you're going to lose a lot of quality and you will get kind of grainy. So I suggest you keep your computer speakers output at between 85 and 90 percent of their, of their total amplification value. Now some sound cards will also like to do enhancements on the audio that comes out of your computer. This particular one can do bass boost, they can do a surround sound, it could do room correction which is like a, sort of like a, a surround sound that's done based upon perimeters that you put into it about room and it can do loudness equalization which is in its description uses a understanding of human hearing to produce perceived volume differences. So this one has several enhancements that I can put on the audio of my computer and I can just play around with those a little bit, enabling and disabling the ones that I think gives me the best output. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to get the best audio output from your computer."