Desktop Theater 5.1- Mikael Hagén - Last updated 22/9/99

Performance: Dolby Prologic and Digital

• Dolby Surround includes three channels. Two for the front with a left and a right speaker and one channel for the two rear speakers used for surround sound.
• Dolby Pro Logic is an enhancement to Dolby Surround and uses a four-channel mix of left, center, right and surround channels. These channels are used for left, center and right speakers up front with one channel used for rear speakers.
• Dolby Digital, also called AC-3, provides six separate channels of crystal clear digital surround sound. The six discrete channels are used in left, center and right speakers up front along with separate channels for two rear speakers and the subwoofer. AC-3 is the audio code decoder in the Dolby Digital sound system which eliminates the data people cannot hear while maintaining all the data that people can listen to, producing Dolby Digital surround sound.

I tried Dolby Surround in a few games (including Turok, Unreal and Expendable) and found it to a good step-up from stereo but far behind 3D sound with 4 speakers. I got curious if it was just the stereo in the rear that made the difference. To find out I enabled 3D sound in Unreal but used Live's Live!Surround. This is a feature Creative uses to allow owners of Surround system that doesn't have a separate in for the rear channels to still be able to use them, but then only mono in rear. I found Live!Surround in Unreal to be a significant improvement compared to Dolby Surround but still a bit behind 4 speaker sound where you get stereo in the rear. The sound effects are clearly better when using 3D sound and the rockets passing by me sound significantly better in Live!Surround mode than in Dolby Surround. Note that the "flying by" feeling is even stronger when using stereo in the rear.

The Live's Movie mode also sounds very similar to Dolby Surround so if you have that card and 4 speakers, there is not much need for a Dolby Surround system for games or movies.

When this system really shines is when you listen to DVD movies with a DD 5.1 (also called AC-3) soundtrack. It's not just that you hear bullets and cars pass you or explosions surround. It’s that the overall sound quality gets a major boost and I think that’s very important. Dolby Digital 5.1 (also called AC-3) without question blows Dolby Prologic out of the water even on these rather inexpensive speakers. The step up from Dolby Prologic to AC-3 is a much more noticeable improvement in my opinion than Dolby Prologic was from stereo. There's no problem to fill a normal sized room with loud and high quality sound when you play a DVD movie. However if you have your DVD player in a living room where you have some distance to the speakers this system will have a tough time to fill the room with loud sound.

I also compared DTT 5.1 with the Live's Movie Mode and the 3D audio option on Zoran's softDVD player that is bundled with the MX300. Creative never says exactly what Movie mode does but after some testing it seems clear that it's very similar to Dolby Surround (like Prologic but no center channel) and to work well the sound source must contain Dolby Prologic/Surround information which all down-mixed AC-3 tracks do. This means Live's Movie mode works with any DVD hardware decoder or software decoder unlike MX300's AC-3 support that will only work with the bundled softDVD program (or any other soft DVD player with the same feature). Zoran's softDVD decodes the AC-3 stream using the processor and then passes along the positional info to Aureal's A3D engine. I thought this would work rather well except it would lose the center channel but after playing several movies I found that while it's an improvement compared to Dolby Prologic and Live's movie mode it's still clearly behind the DTT 5.1's ac-3 mode.

There are a couple of other software DVD programs that decodes the AC-3 signal and then pass on the positional info to a 4 speaker soundcard.  The ones I know of is PowerDVD 2.0  (pressrelease) and WinDVD but they only work with some soundcards and at the moment the WinDVD version that support this feature is only available when bundled with a soundcard.  I've know tried WinDVD in 4-speaker mode and it's better but still not as good as the DTT 5.1, DTT2500 or DigiTheatre.

You can still use a soft DVD player and here the magic of DD 5.1 if your soundcard have a SPDIF that supports AC-3 pass-thru. At this time most software DVD players only supports the SPDIF on a few specific soundcards but I would expect that to change over the next few months.

The only major weakness of these speakers is the fact that they are not powerful enough to fill a big living room with loud and excellent sound effects. For a smaller room they offer great sound for gaming, good sound for music and excellent (at this price point) sound for DVD movies. The ease of changing between Dolby Digital and 4 speaker gaming, the easy access to the volume controls and the stereo-to 5.1 surround modes for music and other stereo content makes this system even better. Two minor problems are the too low stands and lack of headphone output on the amplifier unit.

Overall Performance: 75/100

Price/Performance Ratio:

The price for the Desktop Theater is too high if you only intend to use it for gaming and listening to music as for that there are better speakers without DD support available at the same price. However, with a suggested retail price of $300 and a street price of $200-250 the Desktop Theater is a great deal for anyone wanting to play DVD movies on their computer. That it's better than the FourPoint Surround in every aspect when it comes to gaming makes the price even more attractive.

score: 95/100

Summary:

With an excellent price for a DD 5.1 system and good sound in a small package the Desktop Theater 5.1 has brought DD 5.1 to the masses. As long as you use the speaker in normal sized room the bang for the buck will be tough to beat.

Overall score: 85/100 

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