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Installation
Installation is idiot proof. This is a good thing since the manual is chock full of classic Engrish sentences like this one from page one: "It is needless to open computer chassis and turn your desktop or laptop into an audio and video entertainment center."
True, it's needless to open your computer, but it's NOT needless to turn your desktop into an entertainment center!
There are two manuals. There is one 30 page manual that only covers the actual "audio box", which is an eDio AS-100 CineMaster made by FIC (yes, the motherboard people), and a two page flyer printed up by Kinyo that covers everything else which is a "Control Center", a remote for the Control Center, five 3" satellites and a 5" subwoofer.
The audio box plugs into the PC via USB. Any Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 98SE up has native drivers for "USB Audio Device".
The audio box features three buttons. There's a "MIC" button that turns the microphone on and off. This beats the pants out of muting the microphone through Windows to avoid feedback.
There's a "SUR" button to enable and disable surround sound. The bad thing about doing this is that the sub reproduces absolutely NOTHING. I pretty much left the surround on all of the time, except for when watching DVDs when actual 5.1 kicked in.
There is also a "MUTE" button. Self-explanatory.
There are three LEDs on top of the audio box as well. Power, Microphone On, and Surround On. The Surround LED only lights when the audio box is decoding it's own 5.1 sound (the Q-Space) from a standard 2 channel signal, like an MP3 or CD Audio. The audio box auto detects inbound 5.1 signals, so regardless of the "SUR" button being depressed, the Surround indicator LED will never light.
The back of the audio box has a LINE/MIC input, FRONT, REAR and C/LFE (Center/Low Frequency Effect) output. This ensures that your channels are truly discrete.
The ensemble comes with a wiring harness reminiscent of car audio of the early 80s. On one end of the harness there are three 1/8" phono jacks. There's one jack for each output on the audio box (or ANY 5.1 sound card for that matter). On the other end there is a proprietary mini DIN plug that plugs into the RB-6A Audio Effect Control Center. This unit is what gives the system external volume control and remote control capability.
The RB-61 unit features LEDs that show whether the signal coming in is 2 channel, surround or 5.1. The back of the feature RCA inputs as well as the proprietary mini DIN input. There are also 6 color coded speaker outputs. These speaker outputs go to yet another proprietary DIN plug that plugs into the back of the subwoofer.
The RB-61 unit can be bypassed altogether by plugging the AS-100 directly into the back of the subwoofer, but doing so negates use of the remote control unit and the ability to adjust volume independent from Windows. The remote control included with the unit controls channel volume, master volume and mute, as well as power.
The back of the subwoofer has the satellite's output jacks and they are not labeled at all. They are, however, color-coded. I simply plugged the satellites into each jack, matching the color of the RCA plug with the color of each jack.
The software bundle included with the Kinyo R655-U is fantastic for a set of speakers, but lame for a sound card. I'm used to speakers coming with squat and soundcards coming with games and MP3 software. This seems to be a happy medium.
First, we have InterVideo's WinDVD version 3.0. Personally, I like WinDVD. Perhaps it's all of my years of owning 3Dfx cards that were bundled with this software. Of course, this software is anything phenomenal in that it is typically bundled with software decoding dependant video cards or bought ion it's "OEM form" for under $10, but it's good DVD software nonetheless.
InterVideo's WinRip 1.1 is another piece of software bundled with the PC. This one took me a minute to install because it asked for a serial number. The sleeve of the CD had the serial number for WinDVD and this did not work for WinRip. It turns out that the root directory of the CD has a Read Me file with the serial number. Who'd a thunk it?! WinRip is an MP3 player, very similar to the look and feel of Winamp. The software is not as powerful as many MP3 suites, but does what it does well, and simply. Pop in a CD, select a bit rate and a format to rip the files to and go. Quick and easy MP3 rips.
The speaker tester is also included and a very good thing to have with this ensemble as the speakers themselves is not individually labeled. I had no problem figuring out which speakers were rears and which were fronts. Rear speakers had the insanely long speaker wires. But left channel and right channel was left as a guessing game based on the position that they plugged into the back of the sub. There are no test tones or white or pink noise, however. For my tests, I had to provide my own tones and noise.
>> First...The Good
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