Vacuum tubes for your PC?
http://www.infosatellite.com/news/20...open_tube.html
Quote:
AOpen released yesterday an innovative (and even a little weird at first sight) product. The company is now promoting the world's first vacuum tube motherboard, called AX4B-533Tube. Even though the attention in this solution is all turned to the tubes, the chipset is still important, and, in this case, it's the Intel 845E.
AOpen expalined that the idea didn't come from nowhere and seems to have solid foundations. The AX4B-533Tube, said the company, "incorporates the novel, modern-day adoption of an idea that was spawned by the invention of the electric light bulb by Thomas A. Edison back in 1879 - the vacuum tube."
The reason why AOpen decided to put the tubes in the new solution is allegedly to improve audio capabilities considerably. The company is turning its focus to "passionate audiophiles and extreme gamers," who the company expects are interested in having the best in audio technology. The solution can be complemented by retailers with speaker systems and the latest CD and DVD playback devices.
A little more about how the idea was born: "We were all together late one night, kicking around lots of crazy ideas when I proposed it would be really cool if we could combine the warmth and depth - tonal realism, if you will - of the sound produced by an audio tube, with one of our state-of the-art motherboards" said Al Peng, product manager at AOpen America. "Laughter turned into raves a few months later when we did our first lab demo of our unique hybrid creation. The reproduced sound was absolutely amazing. It left everyone stunned. What we realized at that moment was how the limitations of typical audio output from a PC as we knew it, had come to an end - and what we were pioneering was a way to literally combine the best of two audio worlds - old and new."
AOpen defends the tubes as the best solution in terms of tonality and claims that the tube output stage of the AX4B-533Tube couples the two front digital stereo output channels with tube output, resulting in outstanding quality of sound.
Putting aside the tubes, let's get to the regular specifications: the AX4B-533Tube comes with the i845E chipset design and features DDR SDRAM memory channels delivering 2.1 GB/s of memory bandwidth to the processor, being made for the Intel Pentium 4 processor with 533Mhz FSB. It comes with a 4X AGP slots, supports 4 ports of USB 2.0 and Ultra ATA/100 interface.
The AX4B-533Tube has an estimated street price of $215 and fully supports ACPI 1.0 and APM 1.2 specs. It comes bundled with Norton Anti-Virus 2002 software.
Yes, I'm aware this is now 4 years old. But I thought it was still wild and most of you probably didn't know about it yet.
I wonder if it really sounds good, or if its just bullshit PR.
