[mas5acre]

http://www.xpcgear.com/musketeer3blk.html


I love good sound and for my new build I bought a Xonar essence stx sound card and would like to add that too, any help? Its discontinued, not on ebay either.

[Ben333]

Thats definitly pretty neat stuff. I think a sound card with a good SNR rating and a good amp would be better, but if you use headphones then this should be perfect. As I understand it, anything with tubes is usually high quality. BTW, I believe this came out back in 05. Might be hard finding one.

[mas5acre]

Originally Posted by Ben333

Thats definitly pretty neat stuff. I think a sound card with a good SNR rating and a good amp would be better, but if you use headphones then this should be perfect. As I understand it, anything with tubes is usually high quality. BTW, I believe this came out back in 05. Might be hard finding one.

From what Ive read, it uses onboard sound or a soundcard's out as it's "in" and simply sounds warmer and looks cool too! I think this is meant only for a stereo setup, not surround sound, which is actually perfect. You said a good SNR rating and amp would be better, well your describing my sound card. The Xonar essence is only a 2 channel headphone amp soundcard, delivering the "essence of sound." Check it out http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%20essence

I want my soundcard to have a friend.

[MadMan007]

It may be not bad for $50 and it looks like it fits in a 5.25" bay but at the same time for $50 I can't imagine it being very high quality as far as a tube amp. Just having tubes doesn't autmatically mean it's good they'd have to skimp on something and I'd guess it would be the caps and output transformers (although it might not have ouput transformers since it's 600 ohm, in which case you have to match it up with the proper impedance headphones.) If you really want something tube get something that's less compromised even if more expensive to start rather than the least expensive thing.

[Marluce]

Wow that's really cool! I'm loving the glow

[ratbuddy]

Originally Posted by mas5acre

http://www.xpcgear.com/musketeer3blk.html


I love good sound and for my new build I bought a Xonar essence stx sound card and would like to add that too, any help? Its discontinued, not on ebay either.

If you really wanna color your sound, you can still get similar (but better) products. Check out http://www.pacificvalve.us/YaqinTB.html

[mas5acre]

I found a supply of refurbished cool master musketeer 1 fan voltage & sound controller on amazon. Was searhing on google/yahoo for days, really wanted a retro look to this new pc. Its silver, so I'll have to spray paint it, but these little suckers of the cooler master musketeer series are so f'ing hard to find, that I gave up looking. I was even browsing foreign sites, hoping one would ship to america, saw a musketeer 3 in the uk, a muskeeter 2 in maylasia and found a refurbished musketeer 1 in good old usa amazon.com thru nextag. I had already searched amazon, and the seller is an idiot making his item title ................................"Silver Performance Controller," nothing to do with cooler master or the musketeer series...., though it does say it in the desciption. He has a 100% rating, so thats cool.

Musketeer one has a fan controller, a voltage slider, and a volume slider with 3 gauges, gauge 1 is fan voltage, 2 isaudio pressure, 3 is temperature of thermal sensor.

Musketeer 2 is purely sound with left and right volume sliders with 3 LED lit gauges with the left one being left channel audio, the middle one is hard drive, and the right one is right channel audio.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-203-1.htm

Musketeer 3 is a tube amp to "warm" the sound of your music, though reviews are quite mixed of this one. Some say it works, others aren't impressed. Also this is Not an amplifier, its line level, meaning it changes the sound, and does not amp it. It has a sound gauge and shows the inner tube.

Any sound gauge on any of these basically dances to the beat of the music as the sound pressure increases. Pretty cool.

This is where to buy the musketeer 1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...Y&linkCode=asm

...cuz you'll never find it otherwise....


I already ordered one, and even though I would of taken any of them, an extra fan controller is nice to have, and an analog thermal sensor is pretty cool.

[Sir Barton]

No pun intended, but if you wanted the "tube look" you couldve just wired up a lightbulb with a few resistors . That particular component will do more harm than good. No doubt the fan controller will work, but Id be suspicious of using that tube output. For $50 including a tube output stage, corners were definitely cut somewhere, and most likely it was in the tube circuit. There has to be a power transformer in there, which on normal tube amps, even small ones, are huge. The capacitors probably have very loose tolerances, and the tube itself is probably Chinese. The Chinese make good tube amps and preamps, but the vacuum tubes they make arent of any reasonable quality.