The non-IT guide to buying a home wireless router

How do you know which home wireless router to buy? It's easy! Just follow the 8 golden rules below.

Honey, this is what we want.

1. The bigger the size of the retail box, the better it is!
2. The retail box must be attractive, preferably with a gloss shine. It looks more impressive and turns head.
3. If the retail box is heavy, it means it has quality components and thick manuals. Good quality components are heavy and good products have thick manuals.
4. It must have a foreign sounding name. Home grown companies is a no-no.
5. Big numbers and the number of features matters. Plug and pray is a must. 
6. The more wireless antenna it has, the better it is. Wireless radiation may cause brain cancer though.
7. It is the cheapest router on the shelf. This has the highest priority among all the rules. Remember your home financial controller will not increase your IT budget.
8. Refer to rule #7.

Reality sucks though.

Misadventures in audio land

The prelude
After waiting a decade for my Altec Lansing XA3021 to die a natural death, I woke up to the fact that it had simply refused to do so and may never do. I had bought the bombastic looking speakers during the period when I was dead broke. At $129, the sound quality was pretty decent but still falling behind the Altec Lansing ACS48 that I had passed to my sister.

  

Altec Lansing XA3021 aka Da bomb. Stripped off it's position and now sits in an environment friendly (body) bag.
0.5 / 5star for serving me for a decade.

And so dissatisfied with the poor quality of the sound I am getting, I decided to shop for a better pair of speakers and sound card.

The sound card

It wasn't so long ago when I scornfully questioned everyone who asked whether they should buy a sound card. Who the hell will pay for a sound card nowadays when it is provided free on every computer. AC97 is good right? My last sound card was the Creative Vibra and Creative Live Value, which was like an era 15 years ago.

After doing some research, I had to eat my words when I realise that the truth is, I didn't have the speakers to tell the difference between on-board sound and a good sound card. The difference lies mainly in the DAC which is important as I had opted for an RCA connection over a SPDIF connection to the speakers. And so I ended up buying a Asus Xonar Essence STX.

Asus Xonar Essence STX. $235. 

Speakers galore

After consulting Ronald, the guru on the subject, I arrived to the conclusion that I will need to acquire a pair of active speakers. An active speaker setup helped to rein cost in while providing the best bang for the buck.. A set of high fidelity audio setup will cost an arm and leg, and have an insane learning curve before it can be tuned correctly.

To be fair, the best bang for the buck should go to a good pair of headset. But as I find them to be uncomfortable over a prolong period of usage, I decided to get a bookshelf type speaker as all I need is a compact near field speaker.

I had also stopped craving for the deep bass from a sub woofer as I found that the cheap ones that comes with the sub $500 2.1 speakers usually just make a flat tone and make everything sound bad. As most of my media is in stereo format, there is also no need to get surround speakers.

With the era of CRT monitors long gone, there is no longer any more need for a magnetically shielded speaker, and I had also included non-PC speakers for evaluation.

Next, I went to The Adephi with Ronald to look for a pair of speakers. Ronald has a better set of pampered years than I do, and his experience with audio equipment helped me greatly.

 

Audio Engine A2. $199.Verdict. 1 / 5 star for making some noise.

Kelvin recommended that I should check out the Audio Engine series. I started out with the A2 which was underwhelming. In a nutshell, it has poor sound reproduction and no sound clarity. I lost interest in about 10 seconds into the demo track.

Audio Engine A5. $449.Verdict. 1.5 / 5 star for making better noise.

Next, I tried the A5 which was an improvement over the A2 but still lacking in the same department. I spent more time evaluating this unit compared to the A5. At lower volume, the sound reproduction quickly deteriorated to unbearable levels.

 

Epoz Aktimate Maxi. $1480.

Verdict. 5 / 5 star for being the best but still it cost too much.

On the urging of another customer in the shop, I went on to check out the Epoz Aktimate Maxi. This baby is above my budget as I was actually interested in the Epoz Aktimate Mini. However it was out of stock and the shop owner insisted that I should try the Maxi instead.

This unit is quite impressive. It scored a full points in all departments except for the price tag. For an active speaker, this is the best speaker I had heard so far. While I had little use for the I-everything dock as I run Android based devices exclusively, it has an array of computer friendly features such as DLNA, Internet radio and FM radio functionality. If you want a great pair of book shelf plug and play dummy proof speakers, you should seriously consider this baby. 

I had to take a sanity check via a lunch break to think over whether I should be getting this baby back home.

  

Elac AM 150. $960.

Verdict. 4.5 / 5 star for being the best bang for the buck.

The dark horse of the day was the Elac AM 150. Unlikely the other speakers, this was meant to for home entertainment system, not the PC. It has two class A/B amp per cabinet, one for the tweeter, and the mid/woofer. As each cabinet is independently powered, this meant the Elac AM 150 has no trouble dishing out serious power. It also has cross over controls at the back of each cabinet, which according to Ronald, is a welcome but uncommon feature.

I couldn't actually nail it but somehow the sound reproduction wasn't as impressive as the Epoz Aktimate Maxi. There was something different it wasn't bad either. I wasn't using the same disc for testing but I could tell that the Elac AM 150 is slightly behind the Maxi.

However at 2/3 the price of the Maxi, it is definitely the best bang for the buck. Even at low volume, sound reproduction is crisp and pleasant. In the end, I decided that this will be the work horse I am looking for.

The horrors of high(er) fidelity

After the setup of the new rig, I tried a couple of MP3s and quickly found that...

1. Good singers sound better. Their vocal range is now expressed properly.
2. Bad singers sound worse. Their vocal range is so flat that a plane can land on it. Seems like nothing can save a bad singer.
3. The difference between bit rates used to encode the MP3s is now apparent. I tried 128 to 320 KBPS MP3s, 900 KBPS FLACs and the few audio CDs that I own. Anything below 256 KBPS sounded terrible now and there is no way to upgrade my MP3 collection. At lower bit rates, the higher and lower frequencies got cut off.
4. Because of point 3, you can actually hear more instruments and tones in the same music. Listening to old tunes is actually refreshing now.
5. It doesn't seem to help make Team Fortress 2 any more fun than it already is.
6. My mom still treat my music as loud noise.

Conclusion
I have no regrets with this rig as it had vastly out performed the Altec Lansing XA3021 and completed all my objectives that I had initially set out to achieve.

However, I doubt that anyone will be interested in burning up cash for audio equipment for the PC even after reading this blog article especially you can buy a computer with it.

Update 20 Feb 2012
I switched the setup to digital mode and it seems that the output sounds better. In digital mode, instead of using the RCA cable for analogue output, they are used for digital SPDIF. This effectively bypass the internal Asus Xonar's DAC which is based on the Texas instruments pcm1792 chip. This leaves the important job to the Elac AM 150 which has an internal DAC.