Keep the white noise to a minimum....
It’s always been a problem, in-game voice comms, I mean. You spend ages setting up your 5.1 or even 7.1 sound system so you know where that missile, laser bolts or Strog is coming from by noise alone, and then what happens when you go online for a CS session? You slip on the headset for decent voice comms
Sure, you need a headset for the microphone, but your team-mates find it stupidly annoying to here the sound coming out from your uber-speaker set-up every time you talk to them too… so you plug in the headphone jack and cut them out too. What a waste. A waste that is, until now.
Click for larger imageYou see, not only are ASUS showing off their AM2 mainboards, they’ve also got a nifty bit of kit coming bundled with the M2N32-SLI Deluxe, a Soundmax stereo microphone. First off, this is directional beam microphone that sits neatly on top of your TFT or CRT and, because it’s a beam mike, it’ll pick up your voice and very little else. But that’s not the clever bit…
The clever bit is the software pictured below, which does some audio jiggery trickery stuff to the sound the mike picks up and filters out all the crud, leaving just the voice to be transmitted to your mates. What this means is that you can whack those speakers up and enjoy your investment in surround sound without the background noise of your missus nagging you or the game sounds muffling what you have to say.
Click for larger imageThe software is adjustable to give you the amount of filtering you want, so rather than turning down the mike threshold you can just adjust the filtering. The process is handled by the CPU, but because the software is specifically written for this AM2 board, actual CPU overhead is going to have a pretty much un-noticeable effect on system performance.
In trying the Soundmax out, pick up is crystal clear even standing a few feet from the mike and the cone for pick-up is fairly narrow. The filtering software with such a good quality mike is superb at scrubbing out all the dross and leaving you with near perfect audio. This could well be the gamers dream come true for those surround sound multiplayer fests.
