Benefits of Digitally Enhanced Headsets

Almost without exception, all of the hottest PC applications today involve audio as a major component. Games, MP3 music files, Internet telephony and chat, movies—no matter what you do with your computer, more likely than not, audio quality is important to you.

The time for true digitally enhanced audio has arrived. Digitally enhanced headsets provide three main benefits over conventional analog headsets. First, the digital interface provides an inherently better signal. Second, once audio data is in digital, rather than analog form, it can be easily modified and customized. Finally, installing and configuring a digital headset can be a great deal easier than an analog one.

Your analog headset is only as good as the sound card you plug it into. Sound cards reside in a PC close to noisy components and devices like CDs, high frequency CPUs, graphic cards, memory chips and hard drives. Sound cards therefore live in a high electromagnetic interference noise environment.

The problem is even more pronounced in small form-factor machines, like laptops, where electronic components are even closer together. In these cases, bypassing the traditional analog sound card inputs becomes even more important.

That's where USB comes in. USB, or Universal Serial Bus, is a high-speed digital connection directly into your PC. The USB connector is now ubiquitous, as it has been included on virtually every PC sold over the past several years. Connecting a headset via a PC's USB port allows you to bypass the sound card entirely, resulting in a cleaner and stronger signal. Plantronics' new digital/USB interface provides optimal audio fidelity for the headset. This digital audio stream can be modified and enhanced directly from the PC. This is a major area where Plantronics digital headsets differentiate themselves.

The use of the DSP is what makes the Plantronics headset line truly digitally enhanced and unique. The DSP and circuitry in the In-line Control can enhance and customize the signal in a number of ways.

For example, in the case of a speech recognition application, the DSP can be used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (also known as signal level compensation) of incoming speech, resulting in greater recognition accuracy.

In much the same way that a stereo equalizer can be adjusted to optimize audio quality for a particular type of music or sound (i.e. movies), the DSP can also apply appropriate filters to the audio stream depending on the type of application being run. Therefore, whether you're running a speech recognition application, playing an MP3 or a CD, chatting over the Internet, watching a movie, or playing an action game, you'll always have the audio parameters set appropriately for optimal performance.

Plantronics digital headsets also provide in-line, push-button volume level and mute controls (see graphic). These digital volume controls provide greater precision than analog wheels. Volume settings are also saved within the headset's memory.

USB connectors, on the other hand, are unique and easy to identify. Although many PCs have more than one USB connector, they all behave exactly the same way, and any device can be plugged into any port. The headsets plug into a single USB port, with no more searching or guessing whether the microphone is actually in the microphone jack or in the speaker jack.