JRosenfeld

I'm thinking of buying a Dell Inspiron 530. The OS would be Vista Ultimate.
It offers a choice of speakers, in particular the following two sets of surround sound:

Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 Speaker System
Logitech® Z-5400 5.1 THX 310 watts Speakers (about £100 more)

Are the Logitech speakers worth the extra? (I'm not concerned about 5.1 v 7.1, just quality of sound).

Which would you recommend?

In addition to a couple of integrated sound options, it offers the Sound Blaster® X-Fi Xtreme Music PCI Soundcard.

Is the X-Fi Xtreme Music card OK with Vista, in particular would I be able to capture audio from line in and 'what you hear' as I currently do on my XP system with Audigy 2 sound card?

Thanks for any advice.

Judas

IMO the X-Fi card in vista is garbage......

but the onboard sound on the dell is not all that great either.... (if the 530 is indeed what it is from the website)..

The only way your going to get rather excellent sound is with an onboard Realtek HD ALC88x series (using a digital fiber/optical cable)... or probably by getting an azuntech X-Fi Prelude card which is probably the best sound card..


as for the speaks..

the Logitech series is an excellent set of speakers... i've yet to have a single one that hasn't impressed me .... currently using the Z-5500's here... love it...

But the Creative speakers have a damn good history with me as well aside from my one set simply dieing all of a sudden. I've heard good things about the 7.1 T7900 series

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Zelig

They're both typical PC speaker systems for their price. The Logitech system will likely be louder/clearer, due to the price and increased power, with the accompanying overbearing Logitech sub.

Creative drivers and features are iffy, depending on your setup, you shouldn't have any trouble getting line in and "what you hear" working in Vista though. It works for me in Vista 64-bit with my Audigy 2 ZS, FWIW.

Or just using analog cable with a good soundcard, considering it sounds as good or better when compared to the decoders on typical PC speakers. $1/meter at your local hardware store.

Not really much difference with the Creative or Auzentech X-fi at this point, the drivers are interchangable. If I was going to get something not from the Creative line, I'd be looking at something using the C-Media CMI-8788 chip (Auzentech X-Meridian, and others).

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JRosenfeld

Many thanks for feedback and advice.

Judas

reason i prefer the digital connection is due to the spdif direct passthrough when playing back anything that support the dolby digital or dts formats....

Where as alot of the sound cards don't properly decode and transmit over the analog connections... either case it's iffy....

Personal prefference.... but i get the knod from several other people i've shown and compared them to.

Plus using a much better more excellent form of matrix surround using the dolby digital LIVE! abilities doesn't seem to work to well over analog vs a bitstream format over digital.

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Necrosis

The big question would be "How important is gaming, and movies"?

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