MSI Media Live Diva Review

RE: Leo Waldock said on 10th June 2009
"But would you ChrisM really buy a Blu-ray drive and software or do you watch movies in your PS3?"

I've had a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive in my HTPC working with TMT2 for over a year ....I don't own a PS3.

While audio quality is subjective and I'm sure everyone accepts this, What I would have liked to have seen is an AV amp connected up to the PC via optical compared against the built in amp directly powering the speakers, for this you could have used a couple of different 5.1 movie soundtracks and with keeping the same speakers you would have a fair comparison.

It would have also been cool to know if the 'high-def' Blu ray soundtracks sound much better through the amp than the plain DTS or Dolby Digital tracks as the onboard video cannot pass out LCPM or Bitstream High def audio.

All my criticism is meant to be constructive and I hope it is taken as such, The quality/depth of the reviews on the site seem to vary wildly in quality of content - for example the Camera reviews are excellent and go in to loads of detail yet reviews like this one seem to lack a basic understanding of who the product is aimed at and what makes it special.

The major thing effecting the quality of the audio amplifier is the quality and the power supply, PC power supplies are affected by the noise of all the other components that they are connected to. I can see from the pictures that this amplifier card has a 4 pin power socket. Can you tell us how clean or silent he sound it when it not activly playing something? Does the amp pickup the hiss and noise for the power supply? If it has some kind of filter built into the card then this issue might be overcome.
Also is the operating system volume control the only volume control for this amp?

These motherboards are dying in huge numbers. MSI doesn't seem to replace them. I bought mine at ALTERNATE (Spain) and my board died recently, six months after working properly, for the same others are dying (some of the mobo's components just burned out). MSI and ALTERNATE won't take any responsibilidy. I'm passing on buying MSI motherboards (ALTERNATE is always a bad place to buy here in Spain, but I had no choice: they're the only ones selling it here.)

Sparkle has recently introduced a PCIe card with an amplifier based on the same D2audio technology. Since you can put that on any motherboard, I highly recommend to stay away from MSI's offer.