Old Tech - Sort of

Well, my Pentium II motherboard bit the dust the other day (Thank You American Electric Power!), so I went to the local computer parts store in search of a new one. Being somewhat of a vacuum tube fan, I settled on the AOpen AX4B-533TUBE board. Yes, this one has a vacuum tube. It uses a dual triode (Sovtek 6922) as the audio amplifier. The board also sports a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 and DDR SDRAM, along with the usual bells and whistles such as LAN, Serial, Parallel, etc. The audio out of the board sounds great, as long as you make sure you have the right impedance speakers/headphones plugged in. My normal 8 ohm headphones were badly overdriven, but plugging the computer into my guitar amp (sounds weird, don't it?) delivered that nice, wide vacuum tube tonality that normal sound cards just can't deliver. I really gotta hand it to the guys at AOpen for delivering a wonderful mix of new and old tech. I do, however, really need to install a window in my case so I can bask in the warm glow of the vacuum tube. -- Christopher L McNabb Operating Systems Analyst Email: cmcnabb(a)4mcnabb.net Virginia Tech ICBM: 37.1356N 80.4272N GMRS: WPSR255 ARS: N2UX Grid Sq: EM97SD