Re: Usable surround receivers
Maybe consider an HTPC?
I don't know allot about them, but I do know about Asus Xoner DGX/DSX and creative Sound Blaster Audigy sound cards that are pretty damned affordable and can be easily added to enhance onboard audio.
I also know that you can get quite a bit of bang for your buck with the 4th and 6th gen Pentium processors, or the Core I3-4130 and AMD A8-7600 without having to overclock or purchase any aftermarket CPU Cooler.
Micro ATX motherboards, especially those from Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus are pretty inexpensive and reliable, and you can get cheap G.Skill, Corsair, and occasionally Crucial RAM that's pretty fast too.
SSD's are allot less expensive now too, and even though most budget drives fail after a short time, you can still get good stuff from SanDisk, OCZ, Adata, and Mushkin. Plus you'll only really need 128GB maximum anyway.
Even without building your own, I know you can still buy them prebuilt, and use th
em very efficiently with Windows 8.1 and 10; or even XP, though you would need an older processor of Nehalem microarchitecture or older, such as a Core I5-750 or Core 2 Duo E8400 to support XP 32Bit, which wouldn't give you any driver problems like XP 64 Bit would.
You can also do relatively well with the integrated GPU on the newer processors, or add a cheap dedicated card like the Nvidia GT610 from Gigabyte, Evga or PNY to the older ones; then just hook up a TV through HDMI and your up and running.
I know that doesn't totally get rid of the GUI issue, but there are hardware remote control hookups you can do that are allot easier to configure, and you can use a screen reader to do what you can with an audio device's control panel, which is something that you just can't do with a regular TV and receiver. Being able to switch older parts out or add expansion cards later on is nice too, since PC's are so upgradable.
It could p
ut you back anywhere from 200 to 400 dollars, but it's a relatively long term solution and I think it could help allot.
You could do most everything by your self as a blind person and would probably only need a sited person if you wanted to be careful.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
