Step up to sound - multimedia upgrade kits - Hardware Review - includes brief descriptions of seven shielded multimedia speakers - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, June, 1994 by Joey Latimer

With Multimedia Upgrade Kits, You Can Make Spreadsheets Sing And Presentations Move

IF YOU THINK GAMES WHEN YOU HEAR MULTIMEDIA, think again. Today there are serious business reasons for getting a multimedia upgrade kit.

For one thing, the number of business-oriented applications available on CD-ROM continues to grow. These include everything from discs devoted to sound and music clips to the Quicken CD-ROM Deluxe Edition, with video interviews of experts giving financial advice, to Microsoft Works and Lotus's SmartSuite office-in-a-box bundle. And programs from word processors to spreadsheets let you embed recorded voice messages--may be to draw a client's attention to a particularly steep rise in sales--in files. Packages like Gold Disk's Astound and Macromedia's Action let you seamlessly add sound, video, and animation to dress up presentations. Adobe Premiere and ATI's MediaMerge, with tools like story-board editors and transition effects, give you real directorial control over QuickTime or Video for Windows motion video files (or both). And with Kodak's Multi-Session PhotoCD technology, pictures developed from a roll of film come back on a compact disc, ready to be edited and pasted into your company newsletter.

What's in the Kits Commonly sold with a sound card (for PCs), speakers, a CD-ROM drive, and utility and application software, multimedia upgrade kits really take advantage of these tools and technologies. Some kits' CD-ROM drives (like those with the Apple, IPC Technologies, and Procom products) have a caddy to hold a CD, keeping them safer from dust than caddyless designs. But the process of putting a CD-ROM in a caddy rather than simply placing it in a pop-out tray requires an extra step that some may find inconvenient.

Typically, the sound card that installs in your PC has an integrated interface--usually either SCSI (small computer systems interface) or proprietary, but sometimes both--for an internal CD-ROM drive. Because of the Mac's built-in four-voice sound synthesizer and digital audio playback, kits for that platform don't require a sound card; the external CD-ROM drives for these kits easily connect to the Mac's SCSI port. In addition, all the internal drive kits we tested for the PC furnish a cable for connecting CD-ROM audio output (for playing audio CDs, for example) to the sound card's CD audio input. That way, you can play both your Grateful Dead CDs as well as digitized and MIDI (musical instrument divital interface) files through a single set of speakers. External CD-ROM drives on PC kits usually have stereo audio jacks that hook up to a sound card. The speakers with the Apple Mac kit we reviewed that separate inputs for both CD drives and the Mac's external speaker, but with Procom's Mac kit speakers, you have to choose between the two.

We found that with many of the PC kits, the process of configuring the software to work with the hardware was not only graceful. Often, we had to change IRQ (interrupt request) settings one or more times before the sound board would work. It's normal for this setting to differ from system to system, so expect to have to try one or two different IRQs (usually an easy change made via software) until everything appears to work. Most installation programs were unable to detect and automatically fix these conflicts.

The PC upgrade kits we tested met the basic MPC2 requirements set by the Multimedia PC Marketing Council (MPC). These specify features such as a 16-bit digital sound card with a MIDI synthesizer, sound inputs and outputs, a MIDI input-output joystick port, and a double-speed (300K per second sustained transfer rate) CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM drive must also be Kodak MultiSession PhotoCD capable as well as CD-ROM XA ready. MultiSession PhotoCD compatibility means you can add more pictures to a PhotoCD disc that already contains some, whereas CD-ROM XA ready means that sound and graphics can be synchronized for playback. These rquirements also ensure that CD-ROM software labeled MPC1 or MPC2 compatible will work.

For optimum performance, make sure your PC has the right power as well. MPC2 specifies at least a 25-MHz 486SX CPU, 4MB of RAM (8MB are recommended), a 160MB hard-disk drive, and a display system capable of 64,000 colors at 640 by 480 resolution.

Testing Them Out We installed the PC kits on a Dell 466V 486/66-MHz computer with 8MB of RAM and a 240MB hard disk. To test the Mac kits, we used a Quadra 800 with 8MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive.

We tested the CD-ROM drives for random access speeds (to judge performance on such operations as searching through a large database) by performing text searches in Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia and tested sequential file access (important for loading programs or large data files) by loading a large TIFF graphic into an image editing program. We also used Aris Entertainment's MPC Wizard utility; this reports, among other things, whether the drives can maintain their 300K per second data transfer rate without taxing the CPU at more than 60 percent of its capacity, as the MPC2 spec recommends. The benefit of this is better motion video and sound synchronization. Aris suggests that these measurements are approximate, but we saw consistent patterns emerge in most cases. (Given 100 percent of the CPU's time and attention, all these drives kept up or exceeded double-speed transfer rates.) MPC Wizard also tests motion video playback of Video for Windows files on the PC kits; on the Mac, we played back QuickTime video files.