Review - Magic 3D Sound from
Wednesday - 21st of October 1998 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Today we will be reviewing the Magic 3D
sound card from Skywell Technologies (ST from now on).
ST is a company that brings us many goods
at a reasonable price. There line-up consists in the range motherbords to voodoo cards and
now soundcards.
I've had the oppertunity to test the Magic
3D Sound, it is an A3D card. Normally we wouldn't do soundcard tests, however, since the
A3D cards have earned there way in 3D gaming & its lightens the processor (wich will
make you voodoo card run faster) i thought i'd make an exeption.
What is A3D ?
A3D stands for Aureal 3D, Aureal is a
firmware name (just like 3Dfx is for its chipsets). The M3D-Sound is based upon an Aureal
Vortex8820. It supports high-quality 3D sound with a directsound accelerator.
What is 3D sound ?
Hmm, hard to explain. However, picture
yourself in a room, in the midlle is a chair wich you sit on and you are listning. If
there is a fly in the room who makes a buzzing noise you'd hear it in front of you, while
moving to the left, the sound is moving to your left and so on from behind. Now imagine 8
flies at once. THAT is 3D sound. The card can handle upto 8 'sound'objects realtime.
Furthermore the Magic3D soundcard is a
standard soundcard wich emulates SB-16. it has Line in/out/speaker/mic/aux/cd in &
outputs and a 64 channel Wavetable on a PCI 2.1 based card.
Enclosed in the package you will find a
driver-cd and a manual.
The verdict
To be honest i expected a lot more from
the a3D series cards. It was quite difficult to install the card since it was doing very
weird things with DMA-channels and IRQ's. This is not something a 'normal' user wants to
fool arround with.
Well, after a while everything was setup
okay & was working reasonable. Since the card is an accelerator i started to do some
benchmarks to see if the card really helps in terms of framerate. Well, it wasn't really
top notch, the best performancegain was about 2-3% but thats about it. Perhaps on a less
faster system other then mine things would be faster, but i didn't notice a big
difference.
The 3D-Sound is very funny, when playing
your favorite 3D-Shoot-em-up sounds are moving with you and arround you. However, the game
must be optimised to do its work in a proper manner. However, a lot of games were playing
weird sounds or were even missing sounds. Three out of five games did not work properly
with A3D. NFS-III only played the engine noise from your own car and in UbiSofts F1-Monaco
sounds were overpitched and shifting extremely left to right by far. Another problem i had
with the card was its mic in. In fact no matter how much i boosted the mic, it barely
recorded anything. The final and last remark i want to make is that the card offers no
proper volume setting regarding Treble and Bass. So you cannot fine-tune your preferred
soundstyle.
Well, i have to be honest, i plugged in my
good old Awe-32 again after one day, and beleive me it sounds much better.
One slight remark, the card comes out
negative to my opinion, but you always have to consider the price. If you wan't a cheap
sound-card in your system with some good options then the Magic 3D Soundcard is definatly
for you.At 40$ Its by far better then any other blank-label-SB compatible soundcard. But
if you want top notch sound quality. Hey then don't buy it!
System, Asus p2b P-II 350Mhz, 128Mb, A3D, 9 Gig, win98, DX6
Contact
You can visit and contact the lads of
Skywell here:
Chinese: www.skywell.com.tw
English : www.magic-3d.com
E-mail : magic3d@mail.skywell.com.tw |
