Magic Wave PCI

Last updated: February 12, 2001

Frank Benfari

Reviewers Note:

Update : The lack of EAX support and only 8 3D Streams make this card a poor choice for anyone that cares about 3D sound in games.

I/O Magic is a 4 ½ year old public company, with strong roots in multimedia product development. They were the first company to develop a PCMCIA Sound card (called the tempo) and a  PCMCIA Video Capture. They have been selling products under their own name for over a year now.

First Impressions: 

When opening the colorful box you'll see a good amount of documents to read while setting up. When taking the card out, you'll notice it's quite small, and it wont take up much space. The documents range from a blue quick install sheet, to a 50 page user's guide. The blue sheet will show you a fast and easy way to install you MagicWave card. User's guide just gives you an overview on how to install the card and use its programs. A CD demo version of Jedi Knight was thrown in... and last but not least the IO Magic Installation CD. The Magic comes with a standard CD ROM cable which is attached from your CD player to your soundcard for CD music.

Technical Overview:

The Magic features line out port and and two output jacks.  You could use this  for 2 sets of speakers but it  does not offer 4 speaker positional audio (but still offers a rather cool surrounding effect).    One lineout is actually  intended to be used for head phones while the other can be used for speakers. IO Magic decided to place an amplified chip on its board to enable the stereo lineout port to allow for use on non-amplified speakers. However, when you do pump up the volume, the speakers start crackling. Moving aside from the outputs, the input ports the same as just about any other card out there, supporting   microphone, stereo line in, modem, CD, MPC CD, Aux, and Full-duplex. All of which would be useful for recording music, or fighting it out in deep space and communicating with your partner in real-time! With the SN ratio of >90 you are sure to get a clean non hissing noise (using the amplified line out with speakers may increase  the hissing) while playing.

Magic supports the following APIs... DirectSound, DirectSound3D, and Aureal's A3D. Those APIs are well known to the gaming industry. DirectSound, Direct Input, and DirectSound3D are accelerated, meaning faster gameplay in videogames with more work offloaded from the CPU.  When these APIs are used by a game, the magic has the power to playback  eight 3Dstreams fully accelerated and played at (in pure hardware) 22khz sound quality, which is slightly lower than CD quality.

Next is MIDI where you have a 64 voice wavetable synthesizer.

The wavetable is great for midis and they added the XG softsynth from Yamaha. The card is wavetable synthesis (that might be a problem for those of you who have slow CPU's), and supports DLS (for downloading samplesets) Since there is no wavetable header so you might as well stick with the XG softsynth they provide. I will will get into hard midi details later on.

Installation:

Placing the card in your PCI bus cant get any easier. When I started booting and landed into win95 a prompt came up which displayed windows found new hardware. From there it asks whether to search the disk or CD-ROM for the appropriate drivers. Of coarse you just lead it to the drivers folder which are contained in the CD (you may need the win95/98 CD. And that's it... it may need a little disk swapping here and there, but after that, your ready to roll.

Driver Updating:

Aureal always releases reference drivers for the vortex chip and A3D API  to better utilize or fix problems on their boards ahead of their hardware partners.   As such you may want to grab these drivers for maximum performance on your IO Magic card.  We recommend you download the drivers before you install the I/O magic and leave it on your system so you can point to them when   windows asks for the drivers. The driver updates work with any vortex reference design card out there (which I may say there is a lot of).  Remember to scroll down the page to check the drivers out.

Configuration: 

The I/O magic Control panel is like any other Vortex based card setup. The wavetable settings allow you to choose how clear you want your mid to come in. By choosing 64 voice Pro quality, you would have maximum instrument definition (meaning more clarity with better sounding instruments) although picking the 64 pro would decrease system performance. I recommend having a 166 CPU running on this option with 32 MB ram.

At times I have noticed slow downs and midi distortion while running other applications and playing a midi.  By choosing the 64 voice-game quality or the 32 voice - pro quality it wont hog up the CPU as much. The wavetable effects are neat, by adding reverb, and chorus you get a cool echoing, but don't overkill the reverb. You might want to use the XG midi that comes bundled in the CD. XG midi will blow you away! Don't forget to go in the drivers CD and go to the yamaha_128 / xg50 folder.

But overall you'll likely not be using these options for midi in games  as its not getting the same game support it used to. But hey! if you want to hear some of the cool midi samples I just mentioned, then download our midi/ mp3 conversions.

Performance:

MagicWave is a PCI soundcard, and nowadays you'll see a lot of PCI products due to their better transfer rates. Your PCI slot is has a faster transfer rate than the old ISA slot, so you will get better performance from the card when using DS, DS3D, A3D enabled games.

As mentioned before, the IO magic wave features DirectSound3D and A3D as their 3D source APIs. Both of which greatly enhance the 3D feeling in a action game. With 8 Accelerated 3D streams in 22khz (slightly below CD quality) in hardware you'll get an extra few frames here and there. Look for games which sport the A3D logo for awesome 3D positional effects with 2-speakers.

Even though the IO magic's specs show you can use a P100, if you plan to take advantage of the A3D functions to it's fullest, you should have at *least* a 200 MMX processor.

Good speakers will be useful. If you happen to hear any hissing then its  likely your speakers. You not only need a set of speakers to hear the 3Dpositional sound from your A3D card, you *must* place the speakers in a "sweet spot" in order to achieve the great 3D effect.  If you happen to turn your head to the side... the 3D realism will be trashed.  If you want the best source of hearing 3D I recommend you use headphones with the Magic. Either way, Aureal has accomplished 2 speakers producing 3D sound with great algorithms.

Bundle:

The Magic's Bundle is pretty good. They added several utilities applications, but you do get a Jedi Knight:Ambush at Paltry 5 demo. Jedi Knights is a A3D enabled title that has been one of the best A3D implementations out.

The following programs are included with the IO MagicWave CD:

A3D Demos: Demonstrations of helicopters, bees, etc... rotating around , above, and under. This is where you can test your A3D positional sound
Voyeur Audio Station: A rack which lets you play and record songs from CD form to wave or mid to wave.
Willow Pond Audio Utilities: Another rack for recording and playing music.
XG Studios: Several XG midi specific applications.

Compatibility:

I/O Magic features DOS support and will work with any existing dos game out there. DOS compatibility will work in either real dos mode or windowed dos. A3d and DirectSound both play a major role in games and soundcards today, luckily the Magic supports both 3D APIs. Full - Duplex compatibility will have you chatting with people around the world while surfing on a XXX rated site (There is just too many of those darn sites)

Summary:

I had a lot of time to really play around with the magic. And although there are some flaws here and there I must say this is one of the best A3D cards to purchase. Bundle is Great, Price is a bit high. What made this better than the stormVX (which is almost identical to it) was the extra few programs they decided to throw in. Overall, this card deserves a 8.5, receiving the *Surge Of Approval* award.

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Reviewed: December  14, 98

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