Below is the system that the Acoustic Edge was installed into, along with any other relevant information.
Pentium
3 700E.
256MB
RAM - Mushkin
High Performance REV2
PC133 222.
Voodoo
5 5500 AGP.
Abit
SH6 motherboard.
DTT
2500
Speakers.
6X
Pioneer DVD drive.
Generic
floppy disk drive.
Diamond
Supra Max modem - PCI.
15”
monitor.
Microsoft
Intellimouse Explorer.
Generic
keyboard.
Speaker setup
The Acoustic Edge supports 5.1 speaker systems, assuming you have such a sound system at your disposal. The Philips Acoustic Edge Audio control panel utility contains an overwhelming amount of speaker options available to tweak with. The Settings tab is where you can select your speaker setup along with Volume control settings.
As you can see the Acoustic Edge offers pretty much everything in this tab that you'll need. The LFE (Low Frequency Effects) volume slider controls the Subwoofer volume level in 5.1 Speakers mode.
Expand All. This setting is an interesting one. When selected this can change normal stereo sound sources into 4/5.1 Channel playback.
Selecting "Expand All" for 2-channel Soft-DVD players expands the output to 4 or 5.1 channels. When playing 4 or 6-channel WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE files (a format commonly used in newer multi-channel wave files), "Expand All'" should
not be selected so that the sounds are heard from the correct speakers.
When using 2 Speakers the QXpander setting can be
enabled to provide a spatial enhancement effect for audio. Essentially this gives a greater 3D audio feel to audio output from 2 Speakers. It's no replacement for having 4 or 5.1 Speakers, but the effect is quite nice nonetheless.
Apply Reverb/QMSS/QXpander to External Input Source. This setting provides a way to enhance the audio playback of External sources by using Qsound fettures to enhance playback of over 4 or 5.1 Speakers (This feature is automtically
enabled for Internal stereo sources, such as .wav files when 4 or 5.1 Speakers is selected).
One thing of interest during installation was the custom SPDIF & Line Out cabling which the Acoustic Edge used. The Line Out consisted of 1 9 Pin jack & cable which split into 3 other jacks - Center & Subwoofer, Rear Left & Right, Front Left & Right respectively. In a similar vein the SPDIF jack cable consisted of both SPDIF In & Out jacks. It's fairly nice & innovative design, certainly an efficient one. No more reaching around your PC to mess with inputs. You simply have 1 cable to deal with which can easily be placed around the side of your system.
