Got an ASUS P5B Motherboard or an Analog Devices 1988 series audio DAC chip in your system…. listen up

If you go to the Asus Website you can download an updated audio driver that will BLOW YOU AWAY!

It includes something called SONIC FOCUS and I’m telling you it sounds great. It sounds better than SRS, better than BBE, better in fact than any other popular sound plugin for Windows Media Player or Winamp.

This works at the hardware level, so it’s compatible with all your software automatically.

To Install The Sonic Focus SoundMAX audio driver you download the driver for the P5B motherboard from the Asus website above. From there you select downloads. Next you fill out a form that tells them what drivers you are looking for and in my case I fill in “motherboard”, “Socket 775″ and “P5B” for the model number of the unit.

Click AUDIO to expand the audio tab and then download your new driver:

Beta Version 6.10.1.6180

Description SoundMAX Audio Driver v6.10.1.6180 for Windows Vista 32/64bit 1. Boost front panel microphone volume under AC’97 mode. File Size 12.87 (MBytes) 2007/10/05 update

Install that on your system and re-boot.

When your system reboots you can RIGHT CLICK on the speaker icon in the system tray (the volume icon) and choose ‘Playback Devices’. When you’ve done that you’re going to see the following:

Click the the “Speakers” button in that box and then click the Properties button and you will see
a tab called “System Effects”. Click that button and you’ll see this:

Make sure to click “Enable Sonic Focus Processing” and then it’s magic. Just play with the sliders until your music sounds great. It’s all live in real-time so play your favorite tracks and adjust until you achieve audio nirvana.

Now it is a little hard to go through all the properties dialog boxes every time you want to adjust the settings so you can also RIGHT click the tray icon that this driver set installs.

After you RIGHT CLICK and Select OPEN SOUNDMAX settings you’ll see this!

As easy to use as it is beautiful (thank you to the hard working programmers at Analog Devices). Easy adjustments of the system are at your fingertips.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to optimize your microphone by clicking the RECORDING tab in this window. Read the paragraph shown into your microphone and ANDREA Electronics Voice enhancments can be yours (even on a cheap microphone like mine).

The microphone enhancements make a real difference for applications like Skype where there is a noticeable difference in audio clarity.

All around this is a MUST HAVE update if you have compatible hardware.

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