The driver suite for the Bravura 7.1 installed without a hitch on 32 bit XP Pro SP 3 and Vista.  The Bravo 7.1 drivers detour from the drivers seen on other “X-Fi” products.  While a debate on if this card can actually be classified as a true X-Fi can be argued, some of the driver features are the same and others are much different. 

Other X-Fi cards have the three tier “Modal” drivers which the end user changes based on the audio task and the new mode puts the DSP power where needed.  The Bravura 7.1 has only one driver pane, the Entertainment Mode panel.

All the cards features are contained within the one pane. Those that like nice lean drivers should definitely like this setup.  We tested the driver sets in both XP and Vista to note any differences between the two driver’s sets looking for variations between the two.

An interesting option is the Vista driver pane has a separate volume control for both the Line outputs (speakers) and the headphones output.  This is a really cool feature to have, especially if you have ever had your ears blown out from incorrect volume settings when switching from headphones to speakers or back.

When clicking on the headphone button another smaller volume control opens, this is the master volume for the cards headphone outputs.  All the other controls are fairly standard and seen on other X-Fi based cards.  Features such as Graphic EQ, Crystalizer, CMSS3D, EAX and master mixer are all available.  We will say the driver for Vista and Win7 seemed to have all required features while the XP drivers seemed to have some things missing that we would like to have seen.  The XP drivers feel like they were added for compatibility sake and some features are not available in XP.  Such features are: The upcoming DTS-Connect driver will only be available for Vista. 

The headphone outputs are only capable of 24/192 KHz output within Vista, in XP it is limited to the same bit depth and sampling rate as the multi channel outputs which are 24/96 kHz . 

The XP driver has a sample rate setting with choices for 48 and 96 KHz with other sample rates being re-sampled to these specifications.  However, given the age of XP and the fact most have moved on to Vista and Win7 we have seen this driver situation in many products, especially in regards to licenses such as DTS.