DIAMOND Xtreme Sound 7.1 USB Audio Device Review

So this Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1 USB audio device came in yesterday. I was able to play around it for a while. First impression is positive to say the best.

This is a pretty new product, it was released at the end of last year. It’s based on c-media cm106 solution. It’s USB 1.1/2.0 powered, and capable of 16bit, 48Khz audio input/output (digital and analog).

The device is smaller than I thought. It’s about the size of a medium sized mouse. Actual dimension is 5x2.5x1”. The construction is made of plastic, it feels ok. It came with a USB cable, one English manual, one French manual, and an installation CD. There are four buttons on the device, recording, muting/un-muting (the play/pause logo is misleading), volume down, and volume up. These are perfect addition to the SONY since the multimedia keys didn’t have these keys!

Installation was easy. Although the device is drive-less, I still opted-in to install the on CD driver which provides a control panel, where you can do some bass management, channel swapping, xear 3D DSP, and equalizer. The driver is mostly stable, but sometimes the control panel will quit, which I haven’t found a way to bring it back unless rebooting… But again, the control panel isn’t really needed, I wouldn’t recommend installing it unless you are intending to use the analog 7.1 HD feature. I haven’t found a way to uninstall the drive and control panel. The driver on the CD is actually an older version (7.12.8.2140), win 7 was able to update to a newer version (7.12.8.2150).

Onto the main subject, I bought this device mainly to suppress the noise from the AC power. My initial testing is positive, while it didn’t eliminate the noise totally, it did keep them down at a reasonable level. I’m actually somewhat satisfied at this aspect. Audio quality wise, there’s no real improvement over the on-board Realtek. It’s a cheap c-media chip, what can you expect after all. And it doesn’t do crazy high resolution, high bit depth like Realtek, just simple 16bit, 48Khz.

There are lots of connectors including headphone, 7.1ch analog output, line in, mic in, digital-in/out. I have tested all the output. The 7.1ch analog output works, but I’m still not able to get good bass response, I’m starting to guess that it’s actually a problem with my AVR? The headphone provides enough amplification, I only need 30% of the volume. If I go beyond 50%, the noise starts becoming noticeable.

The digital output passes through AC3 and DTS without problem. It only supports 48Khz though while most devices I’ve tried supports at least 44.1Khz and 48Khz.

Considering I got the device cheap enough (after the $20 rebate on Amazon), I think this device is a keeper. But I’ll keep an eye on other solutions.

Subtitle Software Bundle Part II - Two subtitle software for getting subs from the original DVD or fansub Ver.2 (03072011 update)

 

(This article is strictly used for hobby and video backup purpose, it would be unethical and illegal to use the software for a profit.)

03072011 update, now includes changing vobsub path under win7 x64.

08242010 update, now includes matching audio that is of different length from original audio (mainly gaps).

06162009 update, now includes multi-angle subtitle decrypting using VOBSUB.

06152009 update, now includes updated easier tutorials on how to sync audios from different editions of DVDs, this method also gives more accurate results.

04182009 update, now includes detailed tutorials on how to sync subtitles and audios from different editions of DVDs.

 

So here are the two more subtitle software... Both of them try to get the subs from the original material, so don't use them for commercial purpose... First software is vobsub (or vsfilter), second is esrXP. Vobsub is used for decrypting subtitles from DVD, it can save as idx+sub file or save as sst/son in conjunction with a bunch of bmp/tiff pictures. idx+sub can be viewed on computer or be embeded into divx files viewed on a divx certified player; sst+scanned bmp/tiff can be used to reauthor DVD. esrXP is used for grabbing the hard-burned subtitles, particularly for Asian language.

Vobsub is designed to show subtitle on computers, but here I am using it to decrypt subtitles from DVD. (There are other software such as Subrip (has more advantage in OCR since it supports italic/bold tag which preserves the DVD typesetting as much as possible), a tool functions the same as vobsub and further more can ocr the pictures back to text or extract menu highlights; or the automation tool, but vobsub has been working fine since day 1 I started to use it, so I never bothered to find other ways to decrypt DVD subtitle. Manual decrypting is good if you want to vastly change the DVD structure such as putting several episodes onto the same disc, if you just want to add subtitle, the easy way is to use automation tools...)