PassMark SoundCheck is an audio testing program for use with your computers sound card speakers and microphone for testing these systems.
Ease of Use, Performance: 20/25, Look & Feel: 20/25,
Features 20/25, How much I enjoy 20/25
Total: 80/100
PassMark SoundCheck is a nice program to check your computers sound system including checking record features and playback of your sound card, speakers and microphone. The program has test waves to check your system, allows record and playback at various sample rates and supports 8, 16 and 24 bit stereo and mono sound.
Okay now that I got the company plug out of the way what does this really do, you can check your sound system at various rates and check the record and playback using SoundCheck using the built in test patterns or create your own. This allows you to check your sound system at high and low frequencies to check for distortion or other problems.
You can also see the wave forms so you know it’s working but this program is more for the audiophile and not your everyday computer user. This is great for optimizing your sound system for audio recording or mixing and would come in very handy for people who work exclusively with audio files and programs.
I found SoundCheck when I was reviewing some speakers and seeing how well they performed. I wanted a program that would record the sound and playback the same sound or a test pattern so I could see how well the speakers performed at high and low frequencies. I also wanted to check out what kind of distortion came through the speakers compared to other speakers so I wanted to have a set and recorded tone that was continuous and played back over two separate speaker systems.
This way I could turn one speaker on and hear the pattern and see what it sounded like compared to the next speaker. This test tone setup is nice to tell if a speaker system has problems at high or low frequencies or problems at various tones or in bass. Creating your own test tone makes this handy so if your system is having problems in certain areas you can narrow this down with various high or low frequencies and specific types of sounds.
SoundCheck has two test programs for checking specific parts of your sound system; one is for your surround sound or 3D and the other checks audio effects and allows you to change settings like feedback, frequency and delay. The surround sound or 3D check allows you to test your surround sound setup to ensure the speakers and sound coming from them and moving between the various speakers is working correctly. The Audio FX will check out various sound types and see how the effects like changing background sounds in a song or very specific effects like reverb and distortion sound.
The SoundCheck program from PassMark is pretty easy to use and has plenty of features like selection of various input and output devices in your system, test patterns, a section to create your own test tone and a couple of effects to add to your sound system to see how these play with your speakers. This is a very specific program and does have a free trial program to see if you like it and would benefit from the full version that costs $24.
Being a very specific program for your sound you may only need to use the free trial version for things like occasionally checking your sound and recording ability but for anyone continually using their sound system for creating music, CD’s of any audiophiles SoundCheck is a must have program.
SoundCheck from PassMark is a very good program to check and test your sound system and well worth the cost if you need to test, record and check various parts of your PC sound system.
