Playback quality
The iDomes look promising on paper and gorgeous in the flesh, but how do they actually sound? Very good indeed. I've used various incarnations of Logitech's high-end PC speakers over the years, and to my ears, the iDomes deliver superior clarity toward the middle and high end of the spectrum. You really need the SW510 subwoofer to get satisfying bass, though. Even then, the lows won't knock you back in your chair, but you will feel them.

If you're looking to wake your neighbors or fill a cavernous room, the iDomes are probably a little too quiet. They do offer plenty of power for mid-size rooms, and they can even fill larger spaces as long as you're not throwing a rave for a bunch of rowdy teenagers who have all but driven themselves to deafness with their iPods.

Of course, we expected the iDomes to sound pretty good. At roughly a combined $250 for the speakers and subwoofer, they had better. But do they sound as good when paired with the digital output of built-in motherboard audio as they do when powered by a high-end sound card like Creative's X-Fi XtremeMusic? To find out, I enlisted a friend for some blind listening tests. Our subject listened to a selection of 30-second WAV clips from our latest sound card comparison played back on the iDomes connected to the analog outputs of an X-Fi XtremeMusic and to the digital output of an EVGA 122-CK-NF68 motherboard with a relatively common Realtek ALC885 codec.

Through several songs, our subject was unable to distinguish reliably between digital motherboard output and analog output coming from the X-Fi. The two sounded all but identical to his ears, and I couldn't discern a meaningful difference in playback quality, either. Score one for the iDomes.

Out of curiosity, I also tried out our integrated motherboard audio against the X-Fi's digital output. Again, there was no difference in playback quality.

These results aren't surprising given the nature of digital audio output, but it's still mildly shocking to hear sound that good coming from onboard audio. The sound quality tanked when we switched to the onboard audio's analog outputs, of course, but that's not the iDomes' fault. And with digital input, there's no need to fall back on analog, anyway.

Time to ditch your sound card?
Combining a motherboard's digital audio output with a set of digital speakers like Abit's iDomes seems like a good way to cut a sound card out of the equation and save some money, and it works rather well if music playback is your only concern. However, it's far from a universal solution.

For starters, the iDomes are only available as a two-channel speaker set, so you don't get true surround sound. Surround audio is a handy feature to have for movie playback, but it's even more vital for games, where being able to place the source of gunfire accurately can mean the difference between life and, uh, waiting 15 seconds to respawn. To be fair, software algorithms can fake surround sound environments using just stereo speakers. However, current virtual surround sound implementations aren't as good as the real thing, and they're not available with the majority of integrated motherboard audio solutions. Thanks, Realtek. Ironically, speaker virtualization schemes are actually more commonly supported on the very discrete sound cards you might want to supplant with the iDomes.

Whether the iDomes can replace your sound card will depend on just how fancy you want your positional audio and surround sound—and whether your motherboard's integrated audio software is up to snuff on those fronts. 3D audio buffs will no doubt have a hard time matching the EAX Advanced HD 5.0 support of Creative's X-Fi, which allows for 128 high definition 3D voices—with hardware acceleration to boot. However, some folks may be more than happy with the EAX 2.0 support offered by most motherboard audio, even if it is limited to just 32 concurrent 3D voices. When combined with the right positional audio algorithm, multi-core processors can largely mute the appeal of hardware acceleration, as well.