Biostar delivers Hi-Fi to mainboards – check for DIN

With the launch of Biostar's new Puro Hi-Fi technology, the mainboard specialist is aiming to hit a signal-to-noise ratio of 110dB which, it claims, will give users near loss-less audio reproduction.

Established in 1986, Biostar is a mainboard manufacturer whose headquarters is located in the Xindian District of New Taipei City. With annual revenues close to the £1 billion mark, it is a serious sized company – but fighting for market share against the biggest brands in the IT world. If you want to survive and thrive in the mainboard market, then you need to innovate. And that's exactly what Biostar hopes to be doing with its next generation of mainboards.

System audio has moved from the early ‘beep' of a PC speaker, through the introduction of the SoundBlaster and AWE64 products from Creative to the HD audio that's found on almost every mainboard produced in the world today.

While the average quality of audio may have improved, true Hi-Fi is something different.

When the happy-chappies of the Deutsches Institut für Normung [German Institute for Standards – Redaktor] sat down for strudel and cocoa in 1966, they decided to define what Hi-Fi was and came up with DIN45500. The use of the phrase has developed over the years, but still implies ‘the best audio possible'.

So let's have a little look at the feature set that Biostar is promising to deliver:-

Audio Power: Which aims to isolate the power being supplied to each audio component, which should reduce noise and improve overall audio quality.

Hi-Fi Ground: New multi-layer, noise-blocking PCB design whose layout will isolate analogue and digital signals for clarity.

Hi-Fi BD: With a 24-bit audio sampling rate of 192KHz, Biostar aims to deliver crisp audio to your home theatre system, headphones or multi-channel speakers.

Multi Channel Calibration: Using feedback from a microphone, your system will ‘learn' the layout of the room and automatically compensate for the dimensions detected.

ESD: Defence mechanism which will prevent damage or interference from static electricity which, according to Biostar, can be a hazard when using headphones.

Hi-Fi Amp: Biostar has built in an amplifier capable of pushing past 100 dB with a pair of high-end headphones and the Smart Ear technology gives you total control over what you hear.

The resistors, capacitors and traces have all been selected for Hi-Fi, rather than gaming/general use – and important bits are protected using an EMI shield.

There is one last claim from Biostar and that's for Diablo III performance – where the company believes that it has the world's best mainboard for this particular game – in part due to the Smart Speed LAN application which gives users total control over how network traffic is handled.

KitGuru says: Innovation is key to this industry of ours and it's good to see someone other than Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI pushing through new features. We'll need to get one of these next-gen Biostar boards into the KitGuru Lab to render an opinion, but – so far – they certainly get top marks for trying.

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