I confess: I'm a hardcore gamer. Too many hours have been spent rewiring my synapses in ways neurologically unimaginable playing Starcraft, Homeworld, Age of Empires, Unreal, and whatever else sucks me in. Like most gamers, when I finally close my bleary eyes and nod off, cathode-crazed images still play across my burnt-out corneas in a mad dance of after-light. Pass the Halcyon!

The big problem is not being able to go crazy at 2:00 AM with a PC sound system blasting the plaster off the walls without having anyone within earshot taking an Uzi for some serious payback. But if you’re a serious gamer, what would you be doing listening to PC speakers? Anyone deep into death matches already knows that headphones are the only way to go. With cans, it’s much easier to use sonic cues to accurately target a lurker faintly rustling in a dark corner. Conventional wisdom dictates that a great pair of cans always produces a much more compelling and sonically accurate PC experience.

What makes this conventional wisdom so compelling is the way normal stereo speakers handle highly directional sonic events. The left and right speakers typically overlap each other. In a right-side only event, your right ear hears two sound source locations: one coming from the right speaker, which represents the actual event, and one coming from the left speaker, which is intended to deliver the left-ear experience. The resulting overlap of sounds causes a blurring or smearing of the soundstage much the way hard echoes can obliterate sounds in an auditorium. With headphones, only the left ear hears what the left-side phone is playing and the right ear what the right-side phone is playing. This makes for a much better stereo effect.

What if you need to share the sound and still want to win at Quake? No problem, buy yourself a Sunfire Theater Grand III surround sound processor with its unique "Holographic" image circuit. Sunfire’s founder is Bob Carver, the audio industry legend with an industry-annoying habit of introducing radical designs that make competitors look foolishly overpriced and overhyped. Think of Bob as high-end audio’s version of Linus Torvalds.

The Sunfire's Holographic circuitry uses phase cancellation of unwanted second source arrivals to create a more three-dimensional and realistic sound stage. Now you can do gut-great gaming on a really huge screen with full sound immersion and still pick up target cues that are not possible with typical stereo electronics. Surrender your canned-bruised cabeza into the hands of this world-class surround processor and you’ll also discover another of living-a-real-life's rewards: ownership of some of the best high-end, multi-function audio gear on the planet.

At $2,375, Sunfire's Theater Grand Processor III looks like a ton of money compared to a $295 PC with eternally free Internet access. Worse, this Sunfire product is a not a surround receiver with built-in amplifiers. To run your speakers, you'll have to shell out more money for some multi-channel amps. Unlike open source computing, there is no free audio lunch. So the real hackers out there are probably asking: Why shell out a couple of grand for a dinosaur consumer electronics product when you can feed 6 channels of decoded surround audio into outboard PC amps and speakers via a PCI soundcard?

Oh, ye great unwashed PC heathens!

The innards of a PC are where even good CD soul music goes when it ends up in electrical interference hell. Most PCs are built to a lowest price point and the power supply is typically the first victim of the bean counters. If you are serious about sound quality, as well as in having a more reliable PC, the first thing on the to-do list is to dump that original crappy power unit and replace it with an electrically quiet supply.

I substituted my original supply with an Ultra-Quiet ATX 400-watt unit ($199) from PC Power and Cooling and got amazing results in lowering the overall audio output noise floor. But, as good as the ATX unit is, it still can't compare to an out-board surround processor lavished with all the noise-quieting tricks of the high-end audio trade. Not only is every electrically buzzing mosquito firmly swatted, you’ll also notice much improved treble quality. Besides, how do you intend to hook up your DVD, laserdisc, DSS, HDTV, and who knows what else?

The Sunfire unit is actually a bargain compared to other high-end surround processors. You have to spend thousands more for a competitive product with comparable sound quality, flexibility, and features. More important, this unit is very alpha geek cool, with rows of luxury liner amber running lights and its Palm Pilot-like programmable remote control. There is even a DB-9 RS-232 connector on its back for hooking the Sunfire directly up to a PC serial port, so you can operate nearly all the Theater Grand III user functions from your computer. And for future expansion there’s an IEEE-1394 Firewire port.

Since we first looked at the Theater Grand II way back in the print days of Open, the electronics in the Theater Grand III have been significantly improved. You can now set your own bass-pounding subwoofer crossover frequencies from 40 to 160Hz via the all-digital bass manager. There are also big improvements in the noise-free 24-bit Motorola DSP processor that is used to create a number of simulated listener environments, including a cathedral, a jazz club, and a stadium. All of these simulated environments can be used for adding multi-channel surround effects to primitive 2-channel stereo sources. There’s nothing quite as spectacular as playing a death match in a sold-out stadium!

The Theater Grand III features numerous surround modes including 7.1 Channel Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital EX, Dolby Pro Logic II, DTS, DTS-ES, DTS Neo:6, and Sunfire's exclusive Side-Axis outputs for 9.1 channels total playback of user-configurable all-speaker stereo. Dolby Digital offers full-frequency, 20Hz to 20kHz playback on all five speakers (front left and right, center, and two rears) and each fully discrete channel works independently of all the others. DTS decode is on-board the Sunfire as well. DTS is also a digital, discrete multi-channel surround system, which is a competitive format to Dolby Digital. Many ears—mine included— find DTS offers superior sonics.

The Theater Grand III rear panel sports a myriad of connections including:

3 inputs and 2 outputs for HDTV wide-bandwidth video
6 audio/video inputs, with S-video and composite video
8-channel analog audio input using RCA connectors for DVD-A, SACD, or other external multichannel source
6 digital audio (S/PDIF) inputs: 4 coax or optical, 2 coax
coaxial and optical digital (S/PDIF) outputs
balanced outputs for primary 7.1 channels
4 subwoofer outputs

 You can even hook up 4 separate subwoofers to the Theater Grand III and have them boom-boom-booming in splendid LFE sturm and drang chaos. And when its time to break the lease, there are those exclusive Side-axis side speaker outputs for 9.1 channels of completely enveloping soundstage

With another audio format war on the horizon, it's also good to know that the Theater Grand III supports Super Audio CD (SACD) promulgated primarily by Sony and DVD-Audio surround formats via 5.1-channel analog inputs. The Theater Grand III even has a first class AM/FM tuner and—mirabile dictu!—a classical phono input. This Sunfire rig even automatically triggers your big video screen to lower itself.

So let's get down to basics. Simply connect the S/PDIF output of your PC's sound card to one of the numerous digital inputs on the Theater Grand, hook up an LCD projector to the computer's VGA output, and get ready for some big-time movie magic with the likes of The Matrix and Dark City. When these DVDs are played through the Theater Grand III, their audio dramatics add a significant emotional wallop. Both are filled with special and often subtle sound effects—although the Matrix is more often pure multi-channel bedlam.

In Dark City, synthesized musical tones are often used to sonically create a brooding, creepy surround effect that perfectly matches the darkness—figuratively and literally—of the movie. As these tones begin to creep in and swell up, you feel the hairs on the nape of your neck begin to rise. On any lesser processor, this creepy aural mood is mushed out of existence, as would be the equally creepy alien teeth clacking in chapters 2 and 5. As for the Matrix and its Oscar-winning sound track, check out chapters 30-31. These chapters feature absolutely right over the top sound effects, which can be played heart-attack loud through the Theater Grand III with no loss in bone-crushing clarity. Do this at your own risk, as I guarantee an angry stirred-from-their-slumber neighborhood mob will soon be banging at your front door.