Daydream Believer
The Age
Thursday September 4, 2008
Rod Easdown looks at how to get better sound from your desktop computer.
FOR all of those folk who are chained to a desktop computer eight hours a day, here's the best idea since those little battery-operated vacuum cleaners that get the sandwich crumbs out of your keyboard - desktop hi-fi.Now it's likely the music at your desk is far from flash. You're either listening to an iPod or some other MP3 player through crappy little speakers or you're listening to MP3 files or a CD in the computer's disc drive through crappy little speakers.Or maybe you reached breaking point and, like me, have a couple of compact, high-quality bookshelf speakers on either side of your monitor driven by an amplifier, CD player and tuner over on a side shelf because they won't fit on the desk, after spending an afternoon drilling holes and rigging up wiring.Either way you'll be delighted to discover that people in the audio industry have finally thought about you. And they are that innovative lot at Pro-Ject who make such brilliant and cheap turntables that they sell the bulk of all European turntables priced at less than 1000 euros.Most CD players and tuners are great lumps of things at about 43cm wide and when I tell you the reason why, you'll fall about laughing: it's so when you stack them up you can put a turntable on top. Great for 1975 but no one seems to have told the designers that we've all been using CDs for a quarter of century now.Of course these days you can package all the necessary electronics in far smaller boxes, as car audio makers have known for yonks, and that's exactly what Pro-Ject is doing with its desktop hi-fi range. The components measure just 103mm wide by 141mm deep with a height of only 38mm, although one or two are a tad higher.With this footprint, if you could fit another business-card holder on your desk, you've got space for a sound system. And we're talking quality music here with 20 watts of power per channel (into an eightohm speaker), a frequency response tailored to CD music at 20Hertz to 20kiloHertz, and performance figures in line with many larger offerings at the price. Purists can even buy a couple of mono-block amplifiers rated at 30watts each.And there's a dock box to patch an iPod into the system, suiting 30-pin iPod connectors.The Australian importers, International Dynamics of Richmond, call the components Box Design and say they've been built for people whose music system consists of a computer and tinny multi-media speakers, and who yearn for something better."The Box Design allows them to build up a true hi-fi system at modest cost, one that doesn't rob much space but is capable of revealing the detail and emotion in music that a PC speaker never can," said the company's spokesman Michael Thornton Smith.The components available locally include the following:Stereo pre-amplifier with a remote control. $399.Stereo power amplifier of 20 watts per channel. $449.Mono amplifier box of 30 watts. $399.FM tuner with automatic frequency control and adaptive noise cancellation, and signal strength and tuning indicators. $269.Switch box adding four line-level inputs that automatically synchronises with the pre-amplifier's input selector. There are two line-level outputs. $229.iPod docking station that includes a remote with iPod control. It also has an S-Video output. $199.And a USB box that's an external computer sound card giving a high-quality output stage to music streaming in from the computer. It also avoids the computer's audio resampling. $199.All RCA sockets are gold-plated and all of these units come with an external power supply or there's a single power box available that can provide power for up to four components. It's $249.Particularly astute audio purists would have noted the absence of any kind of disc player, but quite apart from one not being physically capable of being accommodated within the footprint of these components, the philosophy at Pro-Ject is that the system is being targeted at people who are seated at a desk with a computer.If they need a disc player they only have to pop a CD into the computer's DVD drive and have the music routed through the USB box to achieve music quality far greater than is possible with an MP3 portable or music carried in computer files.For purists a turntable can be hooked in provided it has a phono pre-amp, or an external one is wired from the turntable to the system.All the components are available in silver or black.
© 2008 The Age
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