Filed under: Audio, Macintosh, Commercial
Hear it loud and clear
by Joey Celis Jul 16th 2008
The built in speakers that come with Apple's notebooks are fine for most basic audio tasks. And if you want better sound you could hook up a set of external speakers. But external speakers aren't always an option and that shouldn't mean that you have to give up on better sound. With Hear, you can add some slick audio processing to make your notebook speakers sound bigger than what they really are.
Hear uses digital signal processing (DSP) to shape the audio coming from your applications (iTunes or DVD player) giving them a much needed boost in equalization and reverb allowing your music or movie to sound its best with the notebook speakers.
To make things easy, Hear has packaged a variety of presents to get you going. If you're the tweaking type, you can adjust the knobs and faders till you get the sound you're after.
In our testing we found the processing fine for most audio content and really enjoyed the phantom center channel option giving a weighted anchor to all the movies we watched.
Hear isn't only for your built in speakers, it also works great with headphones or external speakers. But if all you have is the notebook built in speakers, Hear will definitely make them sound better.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
