Page 4 -- Chips and Fish

Photography

Lets start with some specifics, the PCIe X-Fi chipset is here, as found in quite a few new boards, including Creatives X-Fi Titanium series. 

Next is the AKM4358 D/A chip, an 8-channel digital-to-analog converter chip.  Its good for 112dB SNR, which is pretty darn good.

A second D/A chip, an AKM4388 (106dB SNR), drives the front panel connector.  This is kinda a killer feature, as quite a few add-in sound cards dont have the F_P connector, or at least not labeled in a useful manner, and adding a high-quality part like this to drive the front panel is excellent.

I just keep thinking, win!  AC97 can bite my

Recording duty is performed by another high-quality AKM5358 analog-to-digital chip, good for a 102dB SNR.  That should be more than sufficient to handle Skype calls, voice chat, or recording line-level inputs.

As we can see, only the front stereo output has the replaceable opamp, in this case a Texas-Instruments/Burr-Brown SPA2134.  These chips are used quite a bit in the audio industry in high-end CD and DVD players.  They are by no means the highest in sound quality, but they dont mess around either.

The opamp also drives both the headphone output and the front stereo output.  The headphone output is specifically designed to handle more finicky headphones with high impedance (like Sennheiser and AKG) and still sound good.  High impedance headphones require more current to achieve the same volume level as a lower impedance headphone would, thus this special circuit to handle them.  It had no problem driving our Grado and AKG headphones.

Of course, then you need to find a ¼ to 3.5mm mini-jack adapter and some fine binaural recordings to send you into headphone heaven!

There we have it, the Prodigy 7.1e is built using high-quality parts, well laid out, well labeled, and the PCIe connector issue besides, has lots of connection features.  It could find a home in number of situations, but especially inviting to gaming enthusiasts who like quality parts.

Let's check on the software side of things.  Next below the break!