CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [359]
Figure 20-36 Hauppauge TV tuner with retractable antenna
Tuner hardware comes with a standard coaxial connection. You can plug in a cable or satellite source just as you would any regular television.
Tuner Software
Once you’ve installed the hardware, you need to load the specific application or applications that make the tuner work as a tuner. If you have a copy of Windows Media Center (through either that version of Windows XP or Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate), that will often be the tool of choice. Tuner card distributors bundle third-party applications with their cards. Figure 20-37 shows the EyeTV software enabling the computer to show television shows.
Figure 20-37 EyeTV tuner application
Tuner Troubleshooting
The two biggest issues with TV tuner devices are operating system compatibility and poor reception. Some cards simply don’t work with Windows Vista, due to driver incompatibility or some other issue. The only fix for this problem is to use one that does work.
The antenna that comes with your tuner should enable you to pick up TV broadcasts in most places, certainly around cities. But a small sliver of metal can only do so well, so you’ll experience stuttering, essentially lost frames that may or may not make the program you’re viewing unviewable. So an antenna used primarily for portable computing, such as the telescoping model pictured in Figure 20-36, is great, but if you install a tuner in a static computer, consider investing in a proper outdoor antenna.
Beyond A+
Sound Card Benchmarking
Sound cards can demand a huge share of system resources—particularly CPU time—during intense work (such as gaming). Most techs who find an otherwise serviceable PC stuttering during games will immediately blame the video card or the video card drivers. What they don’t realize is that sound cards can be the cause of the problem. A test of a client’s built-in audio, for example, revealed that at peak usage the sound card took more than 30 percent of the CPU cycles. Thirty percent? Holy smokes! And he wondered why his system bogged down on yesterday’s games! He could just forget about playing Crysis.
The folks at http://audio.rightmark.org make an excellent suite of sound card benchmarking utilities that helps you analyze the particulars of any sound card: RightMark 3DSound (Figure 20-38). It will run a system through fairly serious tests, from regular sound to 3-D positional audio, and reveal whether or not the sound processor—built-in or expansion card—is causing a problem with resource use. You can find the utility at http://audio.rightmark.org.
Figure 20-38 RightMark 3DSound
Chapter Review
Questions
1. What refers to the number of characteristics of a particular sound captured when sampling?
A. Sample rate
B. Kilohertz
C. Bit depth
D. Quality rating
2. All recorded sound formats used in PCs today are derived from which format?
A. WAV
B. Fraunhoffer
C. MP3
D. PCM
3. Which sound format contains no actual sound recording but only a series of commands stored in a text file for the sound card to interpret?
A. WMA
B. WAV
C. MIDI
D. MP3
4. How many speakers are in a Dolby Digital 5.1 setup?
A. Five speakers plus a subwoofer
B. Six speakers plus a subwoofer
C. Seven speakers plus a subwoofer
D. Eight speakers plus a subwoofer
5. What is the name of the extensions to the DirectSound3D standard developed by Creative Labs?
A. EAX
B. MP3
C. Positional audio
D. Reverberation
6. What is the name of the standard digital connection that replaces many analog connections on some sound cards?
A. CD audio connector
B. AUX connector
C. TAD connector
D. S/PDIF connector
7. Which sampling rate would