Terratec's SoundSystem DMX Soundcard

Published: January 13, 2000 -  Mikael Hagén and Mark Muschett

Update: Terratec did release a driver update about a year after posting this but several issues remains. We may post a review a short review later but not a high priority. We most certainly recommend against buying this product if you intend to use it for gaming.  Note this product is not be be confused with the DMX Xfire 1024 or the recently announced SoundSystem DMX 6fire 24/96.

This card uses ESS's Canyon3D chip and supports headphones, 2 and 4 speakers. It also has a digital daughtercard that features both optical and coax in/out. When it comes to 3D sound the card supports DS3D, EAX and A3D 1.X using Sensaura's 3D sound and reverb engine. When tested the Sensaura algorithm with other cards I found it to be on par with Aureal's but this card also supports Sensaura's new MacroFX technology that offers a significantly improved rendering of 3D sound sources that are closer than 1 meter compared to other 3D sound cards. At least in theory it should in practice I found it to work great in some demos and in Unreal but in most other games it doesn't offer any significant improvements. Future games will probably take better advantage of MacroFX. They don't have to do any special just place the sound source close enough and not have set the maximum volume further away than 1 meter.

When it comes to 4 speaker 3D sound the card uses Sensaura's MultiDrive and I found it to be the best 4 speaker implementation yet. It really excels when it comes to rockets and other fast moving objects passing by.

The reverb used with the latest DMX drivers is ok but not as good as the SB Live and also behind QSound's latest reverb engine IMHO. Unlike the SBLive the reverb engine can't be used other than in EAX games.

The downside of this card is the current drivers and poor midi. The drivers have not caused any crashes for us (unlike others who report crashes) and except for Alien versus Predator it works well in terms of sound quality in most of the games that we have tested.  Having said that they have several other significant issues. These problems include no front-rear fader for games using 3D sound, no way to select headphone as output, can only play one wave file at the time.  Other problems are the DMX control panel that sits in the system tray seems to take up far too much of your system resources and sometime for no apparent reason after rebooting the system it will default back to two speaker mode if it was set to four speakers before rebooting.   The performance of the drivers are also rather poor even with the latest drivers from Terratec which is rather surprising given the power of the Canyon3D on paper.   This does not affect all games but does affect one high profile engine in particular.  That is Unreal Tournament.  Performance in Unreal Tournament with current drivers for me is unacceptably poor. 

With the most recent drivers AC3 pass-thru is still unsupported by the card and while four speaker downmixing (which is supposed to work with PowerDVD 2.5 on Canayon3D based boards)  can be selected on PowerDVD 2.5,  the rear output is choppy.  Another problem that we had heard about on the newsgroups was if you need reliable, bit-correct digital in-and output the card does not deliver.   Its worth noting here that all cards supporting the AC-97 specification have the internal sample rate fixed a 48kHz. This cannot be changed as a change would mean that the card would not be compatible with Microsoft's driver interface for it or with the PC98 / PC99 specifications. For a card with digital input, this means that all incoming signals are transferred to 48kHz. For this reason when using a digital I/O of AC-97 certified cards the signal cannot be bit-identical (since it is resampled to 48kHz) but the result is typically more than enough for any home and even for semi-professional users. The problem with the DMX may have been poor quality resampling and the latest drivers do mention "emphasis bit digital out" in the fixes this may have been fixed as much as is possible when the above is considered.  Based on all of that and the cards $200 price tag we cannot currently recommend it. 

However, given that the DMX is based on the same core design as DiamondMM's new MX400, the driver quality of the DMX should improve significantly with EAX 2.0 and Sensaura's Digital Ear technology all possible additions to its feature set.  We managed to get our hands on the MX400 drivers (but no MX400) and did the necessary juggling to get them to work correctly on the DMX.  Since both cards use the same Canyon3D chip they should in theory be at least somewhat compatible.  The results were actually very positive and we assume will carry forward into the next driver revision for the DMX.  According to Aureal's Minerva test program, the drivers reduced the number of hardware Direct Sound streams from 96 to 80 and bumped the number of hardware   3d sound streams from 32 to 48 and ZD audio performance is also improved.   More importantly, performance in Unreal Tournament is much improved climbing into the same range as other good performers.    Its also worth noting that these MX400 drivers use Sensaura's new reverb engine that supports EAX 2.0 and I3DL2.   The reverb quality is improved from earlier drivers and while to our ears its still not as good as the Live or QSound's reverb,  its definitely good enough to be a positive feature.   Note that we are not going to show actual performance numbers here as we have thrown togther a sneak peak at the MX400 drivers using the DMX as our test platform.   Hopefully  we will get new DMX drivers very soon at which point we will complete the full review of the DMX.

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