In the box & Drivers

After installing the card and the latest drivers available at Guillemot’s website I was ready to go with the Fortissimo. If you look at the card you will see that you have two connectors, one labeled Mitsumi and the other Panasonic, I supposed those were meant to be used for the CD Audio input… well, the cable I had didn’t fit in any of those connectors but there was a third one labeled “IDE”, since the Fortissimo didn’t come with any instructions but a quick installation guide which didn’t say much about that, I wasn’t sure if I should use that connector but after booting up and playing a CD successfully I knew I had done the right thing.

Regarding the drivers, I don’t have any complaints about them, for some reason the volume level of the Fortissimo is much lower than the SBLive! Or MX400 but that isn’t very important. I tested a lot of games and everything was just fine with no sound stuttering or such things.

I must admit I didn’t expect much of the software included with the Fortissimo but I was surprised to see that Guillemot included a nice control panel with basic functionality, still a nice addition though. Other than that they also included some Yamaha utilities (nothing I was interested in much), a CD with Rayman 2, MixMan and Music Match Jukebox and finally a CD with Acid DJ, a very nice program for mixing and doing all that kind of stuff.

Sensaura 3D Positional Effects

As we mentioned before, the Maxi Sound Fortissimo uses Sensaura 3D Positional Sound technology, with the Multidrive feature being the most remarkable one, that includes MacroFX effects which in combination with DirectSound3D can capture the sounds that are really close to the player in a game, normally you would only get to hear sounds relatively near to you (say a “meter”) but with MacroFX you could hear sounds really near to you such as a whisper in the ear or something like that.

Also MultiDrive manages independently the way sound is sent to the speakers, this helps a lot when you use 4 speakers, I can tell that after testing the Diamond MX400 which also uses Sensaura’s 3D however with the Fortissimo was a rather different story, more on that later.

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