Terratec Aureon 5.1 USB review

PC sound has come a long way from the beeps and squawks of the early days.

Most motherboards used in desktop PCs offer built-in support for 5.1 surround sound and high-quality connections for musicians. Notebooks, sadly, still lag a long way behind. With tinny speakers and limited performance, notebooks used to be of little interest to hi-fi buffs and musos. The latest laptops, however, have DVD drives and bags of power - making better-quality audio a more pressing concern.

For this reason, Terratec has brought out the Aureon 5.1, a USB sound card that has all the ports you need to plug decent stereo or surround sound speakers into. You simply connect it to your laptop and, hey presto, 'proper' sound quality for the first time. Or, at least, that's the theory.

Unlike most sound cards these days, which are said to be '24-bit' (referring to the amount of information, measured in bits, used to digitally represent sounds) the Aureon is only 16-bit, 48kHz. This is still slightly better than CD quality, though, so if you only want to listen to CDs or MP3s, you'd have to ears like bat's for it be a big problem. What it does mean is that the Aureon won't be able support some newer audio formats, such as DVD-Audio. That's one reason for buying it out of the window.

On the bright side, the Aureon is very easy to set up. You just plug it in, and you're up and running within seconds. Sound quality was good, too. Music was crisp with the right amounts of treble and bass. There was no distortion, even at high volume - something some cheaper soundcards don't always manage. Surround-sound quality was good too, and didn't suffer from 'crosstalk', in which the effects for one surround sound channel can be heard in another. Again, this is not something that all sound cards manage.

If you do want to add 'proper' desktop PC-quality audio to a laptop, then the Aureon will do the job. The whole setup won't be very mobile, but perhaps you could plug it into some kind of docking station. The good thing is that your laptop will then be able to play music and surround-sound audio that actually sounds good.

It's a shame the Aureon can't cope with new formats like DVD audio, which is something you'd expect from a new sound card. It's also rather expensive. An equivalent product from Philips, the PSC805 Aurilium, costs a good 30 quid less. For this reason, the Terratec misses out on a Top 50 award - but it's still good enough for a recommendation.