A Closer Look: Drivers

These drivers look very familiar as they are the stock drivers for C-Media based cards and have been seen on quite a few cards including the first generations X-Meridian 7.1.  There have been some improvements from the days of the original XM and the drivers operate without a hitch.

Main

The main panel of the driver offers settings for both analog and digital I/O and DSP mode settings for 3^rd party routines such as Dolby and DTS features. 

For surround sound, the end user has individual level settings for each channel and delay settings for the center and rear channels.  The S/Pdif drop down menu allows various bit rate settings along with the cards Dolby Digital and DTS digital encoders.

Mixer

The mixer panel is fairly straight forward with signal level adjustment faders for all input and output from the card.  There is also a drop down menu to select which card the drivers are controlling.  The recording faders also have settings for low latency signal monitoring.

Effect

The Effect panel allows the user to control all the effects settings for the card including the reverb engine and graphic equalizer.  There are is a secondary setting to adjust the environment size for the reverb engine.  The graphics EQ has a variance from +20db to -20dB and features 12 factory presets along with a user preset load/save system.

Flexbass

The Flexbass panel offer adjustment for the cutoff frequency for the bass redirection.  There is also a setting for speaker size for system with large and small satellites. These settings are also available for headphones users.

There is also a driver pane for Karaoke and magic voice which can adjust the pitch of your voice and the key of music.  Magic voice can disguise your voice for interesting effects for VoIP or other communication applications.

For those of you looking to hit the American idol scene, these effects might be of interest.