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Mark Muschett puts Abit's SP50 5.1 Home Theater system to the test |
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Introduction Abit is a name that should be familiar to many PC users but that's thanks to their strong line of motherboards and not because of any established presence in the audio market. However, they have been widening their focus into the multimedia market with video cards for a little while now. Late last year (2000) they decided to enter the multimedia audio market with a FM801 based 6 channel sound card and two 5.1 ready speaker systems, the more entry level SP-51 and the higher end SP-50. In this review we will be looking at the very striking SP-50 which typically comes bundled with the aforementioned Abit-AU10 5.1 output sound card, an IR remote and a special version of WinDVD 2000 pre-configured to work with the remote. In this review we will take a look at SP-50 Home Theater system both as a bundle with the sound card as well without the sound card (since Abit has indicated that they expect that some of their dealers will be offering the speakers separately). The ERP for the AU10 is $40 to $50 and the SP50 bundle is about $250 We will also take a look at two different models of speaker stands that Abit is offering for sale (ERP of $35-40) separately, designed with the SP-50 in mind. In this $250 price range the SP-50 is going head to head with the most of other popular 5.1 speaker systems on the market, but with an added twist in that the Abit system also includes the sound card. In this review we set out with a few main goals in mind. One was to determine how the AU10 performs for music, games and DVDs. Most of the detailed analysis of that went into answering this question will be found in our ForteMedia FM801 Reference Review and you can find a shorter summary with package specific details in our Abit AU10 review. What we will do here is summarize some key points and point out any differences from the generic overview. The second was to determine if the AU10 was a good match for the SP-50 speaker system. Lastly, we setout to isolate the speaker system performance from the bundled AU10 sound card performance. This may be interesting to many of you as the speaker system uses both G9 and standard RCA inputs so can in theory be used with any 6 channel sound card or Dolby Digital decoders like the MidiLand ADS-2000 or Jazz’s DE-005 and DE-006 Dolby Digital / DTS decoders. So on to detailed overview and installation
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