On surround, even if u select 4 speakers and the EQ is enabled u can't hear the EQ. U hear the EQ only on front speakers, even if u have 4 connected. Now start to play a song and move the volume of winamp to max , then to min when u hear nothing. For an audiophile with medium budget I recommand the SoundBlaster Live! DareDevil , Apr 28, The drivers in the box were terrible though, and upgrading to 2. I have no idea where you're hearing the noise from - I hear no noise other than the when I drive my speakers to max and that noise seems to be present with any soundcard, including my sblive value, or without any inputs at all, so it's from my speakers.
As to the "winamp bug," it's the way the drivers handle the volume it seems. In Live! Why it doesn't update the volume slider, I don't know. I'll agree it sounded pretty poor in the old drivers not to mention winamp could only do stereo, not 4 channel , but the new drivers fixed the 4 channel thing and made my music sound great.
The bass can't be exaggerated as much from within the equalizer, but I don't like exaggerated bass anyway, and this sound card seems to actually have stronger, more even bass maybe my imagination when set properly. If you're having problems with distortion in the equalizer, try lowering the bars below 0db instead of raising them, so you don't push the internal amp too high, and then just raise the volume on your speakers.
The SBLive suffers from the same problem, the internal amp is just too weak. It's a good price for all the features, especially the breakout box. My SBLive! Value had no digital output at all, and frankly I was getting fed up with Creative's insane delays in driver updates, as well as their broken drivers. Ware 4 should have come out last year, but it didn't. It's not particularly fair to compare this to an SBLive!
Value, as it compares more readily to the SBLive! Platinum with Live! Hercules has cheaper soundcards based on the same chipset for people who don't want the breakout box, but that thing has a great deal of very handy connections.
I'm happy with my investment and would recommend this card. FaxData , May 6, You must log in or sign up to reply here. Show Ignored Content. Share This Page. Your name or email address: Do you already have an account? No, create an account now. There's a volume control for the 'phones and a level control for the mic. The front panel also has a standard gameport socket for your joystick or game pad. The big news for many users, though, are the analogue outputs on the back of the rack.
Full six channel output, kids - RCA connectors for front right and left, rear right and left, centre channel, and subwoofer. If you want your front and rear speakers to be computer speakers that use a stereo eighth-inch plug rather than RCA plugs, you don't need to get an adapter; the front and rear outputs also have an eighth-inch socket. The rack also serves as a four port self powered USB hub.
There are two USB ports on the front and two on the back. The rack's cable has a separate connector at the PC end, for you to plug into one of the USB ports on the back of your computer. The hub draws power from the PCI slot you plug the Game Theater card into, and so it doesn't need a separate plugpack. All of the connectors are gold plated, which is not a good thing unless all of your plugs are gold plated too.
Otherwise, galvanic corrosion effects will just corrode your chrome plated connectors faster than they'd otherwise rust, and you'll get a lousier connection in due course. This is unlikely to cause any serious problems, though. Just twisting the plug will break up the corrosion and give you a decent contact again, if it does have a significant effect.
But even with gold plugs, gold connectors don't actually make a big difference to anything unless you live by the seaside.
The basic drivers for the Game Theater XP you can get the latest drivers by picking the Game Theater XP from the drop-down box on the Hercules download page here work with all current flavours of Windows - 95, 98, and ME.
You also get a few bundled apps which you may find useful, and some others you're almost certain to find useless. There's also MusicMatch Jukebox, but the free downloadable Basic version of the software is good enough for most people.
There's Kool Karaoke Lite, which is another program you can download for free if you're one of the sick, sick, evil, dedicated-to-the-destruction-of-all-that's-good-about-living people who like that sort of thing. There's Magix PlayR Jukebox, another free-download program that's one of the many less than totally exciting competitors to Winamp. Just hook 'em up to your surround amp and speakers, or to an appropriate collection of computer speakers; two, four or six speaker well, 5. Many other multi-output sound cards let you do some sort of surround-sound DVD playback, but they usually only have four direct outputs, with no centre or subwoofer channel.
And they may or may not work with the quality DVD playback program of your choice. If you've only got four speakers, the XP does proper downmixing of 5. You just tell it to use four speaker mode and you're away. The full six speaker setup will only work when you're playing DVDs, though. In games, the Sensaura technology that the XP uses means that it only sends sound to the four standard outputs - the front and rear stereo pairs.
But if you've connected a six speaker set, two of 'em won't do anything unless you can connect them to another channel. Buy yourself a 5. You need an outboard 5. I don't have a digital-in decoder to test it with, though, so I'm just going on others' say-so here. The XP also supports Dolby Headphone , for positional-audio surround from headphones, so you don't strictly speaking need a speaker set at all. What there isn't in the Game Theater XP software bundle, is a decent audio record-and-edit package.
You do get Sonic Foundry's ACID XPress , but that's another free-to-download package, and it's not a general purpose audio manipulator - it's for making loop-based music. If you're buying a Game Theater XP as a cheap-ish way into semi-pro PC sound editing, you'll therefore have to drop some dollars on Cool Edit , Sound Forge or whatever other audio editor takes your fancy.
There also aren't any bundled games - well, not full versions, anyway. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. The games that come bundled with many pieces of brand name hot gamer hardware are, often, quite good.
But they're seldom very new, which means the nutty gamers that are paying for the hardware will either already have them, or not want them. Better to keep the frills to a minimum and the price down. You do get the Gameloft multiplayer game-finding package, which seems to me to just be the GameSpy you use when you're tired of the popular option. And Nvidia's Quake 3 Arena level. These are all free downloads too, of course.
But to think that they are the only makers of quality sound cards would be a big mistake. The Hercules Corporation has been making quality video card products since Early on they pioneered video processes that helped shape the innovations that we see today. In , the Guillemot Corporation acquired Hercules, which added to their market strength, allowing them to add a new line of products to be sold under the well know Hercules brand name.
Along with their well known video products, Hercules now offers quality sound cards and digital imaging tools as well. With the creation of a "Rack", all of the audio cards connections are much more accessible, eliminating the need to reach around the back of your system. The addition of an external unit also allows room for additional features that really help the consumer get the most out of their sound card. Let us take a look at what the Game Theater XP has to offer
0コメント