Well, I thought I'd bring this back up again - and will again cite my reasoning why I feel having a seperate subforum for audio hardware would be worthwhile.
1.) There's a lot to cover - everything from standalone audio cards and motherboard onboard solutions, to headsets and multi-channel speaker systems and recievers . . . both anaologue and digital. As it is, I feel a lot of the threads discussing these topics tend to get buried rather quickly within the GH subforum - having a subforum for dealing with audio equipment and hardware would make them much more easier to spot . . . and would eliminate some of the clutter that, IMHO, abounds in the GH section. Personally, I feel that if this aspect of the tech market can be given more exposure, we'd see more users becoming interested in it as well. I can recall maybe 3 different threads over the last 6 months where a few of our more knowledgable users had engaged in some fairly in-depth discussion over audio hardware, and those discussions, IMO, were quite beneficial and helpful to users who read through them . . . I think that if we could have a more dedicated space for such discussion would entice more users to engage the subject matter as well. We have some extremelly knowledgable audio hardware users around TPU . . .
2.) Audio equipment itself has changed a lot over the years, and with the advent of onboard systems, various other issues have come up . . . with stand-alone audio cards becoming more and more prevailant in systems (even OE systems), I forsee more questions and discussions arising in the future . . . even more-so when one takes into account how much more powerful other system devices are, and the oftimes negative impact these devices can have on audio equipment (high-powered GPUs, CPUs . . . WiFi devices, numerous high-powered case fans, 1kW+ PSUs, etc.) . . . not to mention how picky and sensitive audio equipment and hardware is . . . IMHO, it seems many times we see repeat threads asking the same questions about nearly the same equipment or hardware . . . again, users don't seem to like to search through dozens and dozens of threads for answers . . .
3.) Most other major sites have some sort of subforum for audio equipment or multimedia . . . and these sections thrive quite well. Although GH does cover audio hardware and equipment by and "umbrella" standard, the market itself is strong enough to warrant individual attention . . . Also, ongoing discussions tend to carry on much longer when not being buried by neighboring threads, and awarness of audio equipment in general would prove beneficial to the community as a whole - I think many people are rather mystified as to how audio processing is carried out, and being able to have a section that users can easily browse through on the topic would be beneficial, as, again, most users don't like to hunt too far for answers . . .
Asides - I also think it'd be great if TPU could start offering reviews of new audio hardware (audio cards themselves, not simply speaker sets and headphones), but I'm not sure what all kinds of work that would entail to arrange. IMO, that's one opf the few types of hardware that seems overlooked with TPU reviews . . .
Anyhow, just wanted to throw this back out into the arena, and open a poll with it as well to collect feedback from our users.
What are y'all's thoughts?
