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Skywell Magic 3D Sound Last updated: February 12, 2001
First Impressions:
The box contain the card, a cd rom , a printed manual (way to go!) and a cd rom connector cable. The cable on first look seemed to be a little short (and as it turns out was a little short). The cd contains drivers for Skywell Magic line of produces including of course the Magic 3D Sound. Aside from the drivers, the cd includes a bunch of wave and midi files as well as a demo of Tiger Shark. More than anything else though, what that hits you with this card is its comptetive suggested retail price of $69.95. Technical Overview: The Skywell Magic 3D Sound, like all Vortex based cards accelerates DirectSound, DirectSound3D and A3D APIs, relieving the CPU of some of those duties (A3D done mostly in software). The Skywell Magic 3D Sound sports a respectable signal to noise ratio of better than 87 dB (compared to better than 92 dB for the more expensive Turtle Beach Montego A3D Xstream and samples audio at up to 48 kHz. This difference in s/n ration is noticable at high volumes, but not a normal playing levels.
In the way of MIDI the card offers the typic vortex fare of up to 64 voice advanced wavetable synthesis (32 hardware + 32 hardware-accelerated software) with 4MB instrument samples stored in PC system RAM using dynamic caching to minimize RAM requirements for only the instruments being used. It also offers reverberation and chorus on the MIDI wavetable instruments. Unlike the Turtle Beach offering, the Magic Sound 3D does not offer the option to connect your own wavetable device, but of course still offers a hardware-based MPU-401 MIDI UART-compatible MIDI interface through the joystick connector. For the price, this is an acceptable sacrifice. The joystick interface (aside from doubling as a MIDI interface) provides standard analog/digital joystick support. The digital joystick further accelerates gameplay by performing remote polling of the joystick position without CPU intervention. Bundle: Voyetra MIDI Orchestrator 2 (MIDI Sequencer) AudioStation 2 (CD, WAV, MIDI media controller), WinDat (WAV file editor) and a wide selection of sound files (WAV) and music files (MIDI) Drivers for Windows 3.1/95/NT4.0/NT5.0 and 98. Not much there, but for the price the only other thing we would ask for are a couple demos that support A3D like Jedi Knight. Installation: Bonus points to Skywell for including a printed manual and while its a pretty basic manual its still a nice change to the going trend of 100-percent electronic documentation. I had already prepared for the installation by checking for and downloading the latest vortex drivers which are 1.160 Note that the card did ship with the solid 1.12c drivers but I was itching to get a vortex card back in my system to play with Aureal's latest drivers s after I quick test of the shipping drivers I dove into the new ones. The card installed flawlessly, with three or four switches between my Windows 98 CD and the Magic CD. As I noted earlier, the provided CD connector was well too short and does not offer the idiot proof conection of some other cards. To reach my CD player at the top of my mid sized ATX case from PCI slot 3 I had to use the cable that was supplied with another card. Skywell would be advised to put in a longer calbe and in fact I have it from a Skywell rep that they will be looking into longer cables in the future. Next to gaming devices. I tested my Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro (a digital device) which worked flawlessly (using 3.02 drivers from Microsoft) in all games I tested it in. Unfortunately I don’t have access to a force feedback stick, so I can’t offer test results in that area. Configuration: Double clicking on the vortex symbol brings up the following control panel. I confirmed that the output was set to external speakers and I turned off the splash to avoid the issues with Unreal. I selected the helicopter demo that sets a circling helicopter into action. Letting the chopper rotate, I moved around the screen and stopped and listened. I had switch out from a four speaker setup for this review and while I am a big fan of multiple speakers, I found that the two speaker A3D support on the Magic Sound is excellent as expected from from all the Vortex based cards. Changing to headphones in the setup and donning my trusty headgear lead to an even more immersive helicopter flyby.
My testing of A3D-enhanced games was done using the headphone settings in order to enhance the sweet spot. In fact, on the Magic 3D Sound there are two audio outputs. One unamplifed, and one with a 4 watt amplifier for headphones. This is a pro and a con as while its convenient to run headphones directly off the card, I am not a fan of cheap onboard amplifiers. Next I tried the new A3D enhanced version of Sin. Pretty sweet! This is a fantastic game which makes good used of A3D. Next in line was Unreal. I left the 3d channels in the advanced options of Unreal on 16 3D streams and experienced the typical drop out to software. A quick change to 8 3D soundstreams and I was off to the races without a problem. Audio effects were consistently handled well by the Skywell Magic 3D Sound. Last on the A3D front I tested the full version of Incoming. Again, a flawless performance with lots of action happening all around me. In summary, the Skywell Magic Sound 3D aside from Unreal with 16 3d sound streams, performed flawlessly in all my game tests. Performance: If this looks familiar, thats because you have seen it before. Performance is excellent as is typical of PCI sound cards in general and this one is no exception performing in the same level as all other Vortex 1 based cards. Using the PCI bus helps the sound card by improving data transfers, which are slower on ISA slots. A good PCI card like the Skywell Magic 3D Sound will help you seek out a few more FPS over an ISA card. In a game that does not support A3D and in a game that does, PCI is now the only way go. Compatibility: In Windows 95 this card offers full backward Sound Blaster compatibility both in a DOS box and in real mode. That’s an added bonus for anyone who would be shopping for a card. Most of you at this point will have abandoned your DOS games, but then there is still Descent and Castle Wolfenstein! Bottom line is whatever your needs, there is no need to keep you ISA card around if you are running Win 95/98 Summary: As I write this review, the list price for the Skywell Magic 3D Sound is $69.99. An excellent price for a card that is of better quality than the cheapest of the vortex providers. However, they find themselves going against Diamond's S90 which will retail for $49.99, so look for the street price to drop on this late offering to the North American market. Skywell will be working hard to make a dent into the competitive North American market after becoming a leading hardware provider in Europe and the Orient so look for them to be responsive to market trends. Given the excellent price/performance ratio we award this card an 8/10 along with the *Surge Of Approval*
NOTE: Skywell are looking for North American distributors. If interested please contact Adam Shyu at the following address. Adam Shyu Areis Marketing Inc. You can also get information right from www.aries-marketing.com
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After
having seen a few Vortex AU8820 chip based cards this one looks a little different. No
slope down the back. Still a very small card as it typical of all the Votex cards.
The card performed
flawlessly in Quake 2, NHL ’98, as well as the Barrage demo. All of these titles
showcased the fairly clean, full-range audio output typical of the vortex. It is possible
that in some older DirectSound titles, there may be problems with the acceleration of
DirectSound by the Vortex chipset. The drivers anticipate this need and allow users to
simply turn off DirectSound acceleration as a work around